Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenheim is best known for her legacy of collecting modern art in both Europe and the United States, but scholars have overlooked her importance as a patron of modern architecture, specifically the exhibition spaces that showcased her art collection. This thesis fills the gap of literature by tracing the architectural history of the collection. Guggenheim represented a catalyst for bridging the role of art and architecture by promoting modern art through three different spatial approaches: creating collaborative and didactic gallery workspaces at Galerie Guggenheim Jeune in London (1938-1939), establishing architectural spaces that employed unique display techniques at Art of This Century in New York (1942-1948), and instituting a final home-museum at Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice (1949-present). Through the use of primary sources, such as Guggenheim’s autobiography, archival sources including familial correspondences, original black and white photographs, newspaper articles, and architectural drawings, I resituate Guggenheim as not only an art patron and collector, but also a benefactor of modern architectural spaces. / text

A defining feature of American abstract expressionist painting is its enormous size and scale. Heroic ambition, the vast American landscape, and the sense of "something big" happening in American painting are often cited as determining factors in this phenomenon. This dissertation examines how Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko not only painted large-scale canvases but, following trends in modern architecture, shifted their painting towards the construction of architectural environments, thus promoting the transformation of painting from a window in the wall to a wall without a window. The artist and architect Tony Smith, a close friend and colleague of these painters, played an active role in encouraging their interest in modern architecture. As a result of their investigations into the physical, as well as conceptual, limits of the canvas, these artists shifted the viewer’s experience from a perceptual experience of pictorial space to a physical encounter with actual space. In contradiction to the notion of the purely optical, one could describe this as a somatic viewing experience, tactile and active, which anticipated specific concerns of 1960s minimalism. This achievement redefines Pollock's, Newman's, and Rothko's legacy to the subsequent generation of artists and places their production into a broader historical framework. / text

From 1922-1942, the Austrian-American architect and designer Frederick Jacob Kiesler (1890-1965) designed architecture based on the idea that it must complement the physiological and psychological processes of the human body. In order to reconcile the technological changes wrought by industrialized production with the need for structures that promoted human health, he developed an inspired model for interactive design. His formative experiences in Europe working with De Stijl and the G-Group, along with his exposure to Central European examples of architecture, art, and science set the agenda for his later works. Yet he never stopped experimenting with new concepts that would bolster his essential philosophy of body-generated space. After he immigrated to the United States in 1926, Kiesler’s pursued his ideas about physiological and psychological architecture within a new cultural milieu and a network of encouraging personal connections. He forged relationships with a sympathetic community of émigré industrial designers and architects who promoted his efforts to integrate modern technology with new design idioms. During his first fifteen years in New York City, Kiesler looked to contemporary science as a way to advance a model of flexible architectural design. He also worked at the cutting edge of industrial design research and was an early protagonist of human factors engineering methods. His body-centered methodology stood in opposition to aesthetic and reductive approaches toward modernism and functionalism. Instead of designing according to a priori determinations of what was functional and what was not, Kiesler’s functionalism was based on an iterative design practice that would reveal progressively more useful and universally applicable forms. / text