City in Space: Frederick Kiesler and the Freestanding Exhibit

In 1925 Kiesler pulled the exhibit off the wall and into the room, a century before the island stand made it routine.

In 1925 Frederick Kiesler took the exhibit off the wall and set it free in the room. This essay follows that idea from Paris to the island stand of today. It gives you a four-faces worksheet for any island and a short reading list on Kiesler's display work.

Most exhibits still hang on a wall and wait to be looked at. In Paris in 1925 Frederick Kiesler asked why the wall was there at all. His answer was City in Space, a framework with no walls and no foundations. The island stand inherited that freedom. It also inherited a duty most islands ignore. It has to work from every side.

The wall as a habit

An inline booth is a back wall with graphics on it, a counter in front and a logo on top. The wall lasts for good reasons. It is cheap, every builder knows how to make it, and it gives the logo somewhere to hang.

It also has costs. A wall gives a stand one approach and one face. So visitors read it from the aisle and walk on instead of stepping in. Even the rules assume the wall. Take the IAEE's Guidelines for Display Rules and Regulations (2019 edition). They generally limit a linear booth's back wall to 8 feet. Display in the front half is kept to 4 feet, so neighbors can see past each other.

Paris, 1925

Josef Hoffmann invited Kiesler to design the Austrian theater section of the Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels modernes. Kiesler built the Raumstadt, or City in Space. It was an open framework of horizontal and vertical beams and panels, close in spirit to De Stijl. It carried theater designs, models and drawings. He presented it as a model of a city floating free in space.

His Manifesto of Tensionism, written the same year, states the program. "Walls, walls, walls", it complains. Then it lists its demands, among them "No walls, no foundations" and "A system of spans (tension) in free space".

Sources disagree on whether the structure hung from the ceiling or stood on the floor. The period photographs are a safer guide than any written account. Every account agrees on the key point. The work was not mounted on the room. It occupied the room.

The system before the city

The idea had a working tool behind it. In 1924 Vienna held the International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques. For that show Kiesler devised the Leger- und Trägersystem, or L+T system (Kiesler Foundation biography). Its freestanding units of horizontal and vertical members held work at eye level. They could be rebuilt for each room.

That was his first freestanding display system, a year before Paris. It was not the first freestanding exhibit. World's fairs had set glass cases in open halls for decades. The claim here is about lineage. Kiesler turned the freestanding object into a theory of display, and the island stand inherits the theory.

What changes when the wall goes

Taking the wall away changes three things at once. First, people can approach from any side. Sightlines come from four aisles, so there is no front by default. Second, objects are seen in the round. Height and depth start to matter more than floor area. Third, the visitor chooses the route. Nobody is led along a wall, and people pick their own way through.

Kiesler tested all three at Art of This Century, the gallery he designed for Peggy Guggenheim in New York in 1942. Paintings were held off the walls on arms that stuck out, or hung on cords. So they floated in the room at eye level.

Lina Bo Bardi took the logic further at MASP in São Paulo in 1968. Her glass easels stood paintings across an open floor, and visitors set their own course among them. The easels were removed in 1996 and returned in December 2015.

The island stand, read through Kiesler

The IAEE guidelines define an island as a booth of any size open to aisles on all four sides. It is typically 20 by 20 feet or larger. Its whole cubic content may be used up to the maximum allowed height, usually 16 feet including signs. The guidelines give 16 to 20 feet as the range for the top of a hanging sign. Your show's own rules override them, so check those first.

Most islands waste that freedom by rebuilding the wall in the middle. A central tower or storage core turns its back to two aisles. The stand has four sides on the floor plan and two in practice.

Kiesler points to another way. Use a light structure that carries content at several heights. Make the edges open enough to walk through. Give people a reason to cross the stand, not just circle it. Modular or custom is a separate choice, and either can be built this way. The first object each approach sees is what makes people stop, the point of what makes people stop at a booth.

Four faces, no back

Draw the stand from each of its four approaches, at eye level and from 15 meters. Then fill in one row per approach.

• North aisle
• East aisle
• South aisle
• West aisle

Place storage and meeting rooms last. Put them only where they will not turn an aisle into a blank side. If two rows read the same, one approach is wasted. For the eye-level half of the drawing, Herbert Bayer's field of vision gives the method. It is one step in the full sequence of exhibition design.

A short reading list on Kiesler's display work follows.

• The L+T system, International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques, Vienna, 1924
• City in Space and the Manifesto of Tensionism, Paris, 1925
• "On Correalism and Biotechnique", Architectural Record, September 1939
• Art of This Century, New York, 1942

One system

Kiesler later called his theory correalism. It treats the object, the person and the space as one system. A good island is that system at trade show scale, with four faces and no back.

Kiesler asked a stand to work from four sides at once. Monet lets a team test that before the build, with 3D renders and walkthrough videos of the island in the real hall. One change to the stand then updates the plan, the renders and the drawings together.