CONTINUOUS CONSTRUCTION
In his 1939 essay entitled "On Correalism and Biotechnique: A Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building Design," Frederick Kiesler proposed a new design technique, continuous construction, which attempted to mimic the continuity of the natural environment. He critiqued contemporary construction methods stating, "Man can only build by joining parts together into a unique structure without continuity" where the "process of disruption through natural forces becomes imminent from the very moment of joining parts."1 Thus, continuous construction was a building-design that should "aim at the reduction of joints, making for higher resistance, higher rigidity, easier maintenance, and lower costs." William Braham claimed that Kiesler's continuous construction was "a strategy to ensure the permanence and endurance of technological artifact...opposed to the changeable, ornamental, and accidental qualities of materials."
Kiesler's Space House is an example of his attempt at continuous construction. Displayed for the Modernage Furniture Company in New York in 1933, the Space House demonstrates a move away from the use of right angles in favor of "a continuous unit overcoming the four-fold division of column, roof, floor, wall," which at the time he called a "shell monolith," "a conversion of compression into continuous tension."2 However, published a year later in Architectural Record, Braham states that Kiersler's Space House as published hardly displayed any spatial features of the building or its construction methods. Braham notes that continuous construction "was Kiesler's repeated answer to the architectural crisis of authenticity"; however, Braham believes its feasibility during Kiesler's time and the extent of which he achieved it is questionable.3