The Elasticity Of Life

Elasticity is absolutely necessary for living a normal life. This fact is cruelly revealed when respiratory, cardiac, digestive, sensory, motor, reproductive or aesthetic problems appear following the inexorable decline of our elastic capital. The protection and maintenance of this capital is one of life’s priorities since this declination begins at the age of twenty and accelerates in times of crises and pandemics. However, there are no therapies yet designed to remedy it. The first part of the book explains the consequences surrounding a lack of elasticity in the skin, the most visible decline, and then other defects in elasticity throughout our bodies, exploring places rarely mentioned. The second part describes the research fighting against elasticity anomalies and examines useful behaviors to protect our elastic capital (e.g. our diets and physical and cognitive activities). This last point is at the heart of current social debates on nutritional, behavioral, environmental and even ethical levels.

Elasticity is absolutely necessary for living a normal life. This fact is cruelly revealed when respiratory, cardiac, digestive, sensory, motor, reproductive or aesthetic problems appear following the inexorable decline of our elastic capital. The protection and maintenance of this capital is one of life’s priorities since this declination begins at the age of twenty and accelerates in times of crises and pandemics. However, there are no therapies yet designed to remedy it. The first part of the book explains the consequences surrounding a lack of elasticity in the skin, the most visible decline, and then other defects in elasticity throughout our bodies, exploring places rarely mentioned. The second part describes the research fighting against elasticity anomalies and examines useful behaviors to protect our elastic capital (e.g. our diets and physical and cognitive activities). This last point is at the heart of current social debates on nutritional, behavioral, environmental and even ethical levels.

Twentieth-century architect Frederick Kiesler's innovative multidisciplinary practice responded to the ever-changing needs of the body in motion, anticipating the research-oriented practices of contemporary art and architecture. In 1960, the renowned architect Philip Johnson championed Frederick Kiesler, calling him “the greatest non-building architect of our time.” Kiesler's ideas were difficult to construct, but as Johnson believed, “enormous” and “profound.” Kiesler (1890–1965) went against the grain of the accepted modern style, rejecting rectilinear glass and steel in favor of more organic forms and flexible structures that could respond to the ever-changing needs of the body in motion. In Elastic Architecture, Stephen Phillips offers the first in-depth exploration of Kiesler's innovative and multidisciplinary research and design practice. Phillips argues that Kiesler established a new career trajectory for architects not as master builders, but as research practitioners whose innovative means and methods could advance alternative and speculative architecture. Indeed, Kiesler's own career was the ultimate uncompromising model of a research-based practice. Exploring Kiesler's formative relationships with the European avant-garde, Phillips shows how Kiesler found inspiration in the plastic arts, experimental theater, early animation, and automatons to develop and refine his spatial concept of the Endless. Moving from Europe to New York in the 1920s, Kiesler applied these radical Dadaist, constructivist, and surrealist practices to his urban display projects, which included shop windows for Saks Fifth Avenue. After launching his innovative Design Correlation Laboratory at Columbia and Yale, Kiesler went on to invent new houses, theaters, and galleries that were meant to move, shift, and adapt to evolutionary changes occurring within the natural and built environment. As Phillips demonstrates vividly, although many of Kiesler's designs remained unbuilt, his ideas proved influential to later generations of architects and speculative artists internationally, including Archigram, Greg Lynn, UNStudio, and Olafur Eliasson.

A distinguished mathematician and notable university teacher, Isaac Todhunter (1820-84) became known in his time for his successful textbooks. Edited and completed by Karl Pearson (1857-1936), and published between 1886 and 1893, this three-part work traces the mathematical understanding of elasticity from Galileo to Lord Kelvin.