Mark Wigley - "The Infinite Interior of Friedl Dicker: Vienna 1898 Auschwitz 1944 New York 2023"

One of the first and strongest students at the Bauhaus in 1919, Friedl Dicker was ultimately more Bauhaus than the Bauhaus—developing a unique trans-disciplinary mode of practice that crossed architecture, interior design, theater sets, fashion, textiles, accessories, painting, photo-collage, graphic design, typography, toys, and pedagogy. This lecture explores the unique sense of interior that Dicker constructed, an architecture to both defend people from a relentlessly brutal exterior world and to free individual creativity in daily life. Dicker’s gift was an unbinding interior, an agile but ultimately fragile space that was systematically erased along with so many of those sheltered within it. Yet the space survives in lingering archival traces that are themselves defiant witnesses—and provocations for design in multiple contexts today.

Mark Wigley is Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University. He is a historian, theorist, and critic who explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. His recent books include: Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-Architectural Transmissions; Passing Through Architecture: The 10 Years of Gordon Matta-Clark; Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation; Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (with Beatriz Colomina); and Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio. He has curated exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, The Drawing Center, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Power Station of Art in Shanghai.

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