In a cluster of eccentrically shaped buildings set amidst the New Mexico desert, 84-year-old Aleksandra Kasuba lives alone. She has always been an independent visionary, forging her own path forward—whether as an artist, poet-philosopher, or architect. Born in Lithuania in 1923, she studied at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts until the occupying Germans shut the school down. She escaped before the Soviet occupation with her husband, sculptor Vytautas Kasuba, and settled in New York.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s she became part of a vital group of young anti-designers who used art, architecture, color, light, sound, and even smell to create singular sensory experiences. Anything seemed possible as they abandoned conventional practice and attempted to translate their experiences into spatial versions of psychedelic flux—what some would call LSDesign. Their goal was to create an ambiguous sense of space in which interiors—and even whole cities—would appear as intangible elements, detached from reality, floating and dematerialized. The right angle, the soul-withering square, the corporate grid would all melt into a web of swirling, non-Euclidean patterns. Domestic architecture was no longer about status or upward mobility. Instead, it was a catalyst for personal transformation: “Change your surroundings and change yourself,” as West Coast architect and activist Sim Van der Ryn wrote.
In the mid-1960s, Kasuba was working on a series of marble mosaics and brick-wall installations—some fabricated as individual art pieces, others designed in collaboration with architects. The undulating forms of her mosaics soon led to a new appreciation of form that was less about mass and surface and more about the tension between objects. “Gazing at a reflection of clouds in a street puddle I pondered the nature of illusion, wondering what was real about the real,” she wrote in 1993. “As my awareness sharpened, the man-made environment, especially the 90-degree angle, became an increasingly more disturbing and unwelcome intrusion.” She began to see space not as an empty gap between objects, but rather as a dynamic continuum. Space, in a sense, pulled invisible strings that conditioned the growth of every shape.
She began work on a scale model for an amorphously curving space called Cloud Room. This unrealized project led, in turn, to a series of walk-in environments made from soft, pliant materials. One evening she took her husband’s undershirt and, in a breakthrough moment, tried stretching it between two plywood disks. “Sure enough, a shape evolved as if by itself,” she recalls. “The shape was not willed, but formed by flows of tension active within the material itself.”
In 1969, she constructed her first full-scale tensile fabric environment for “Contemplative Environments,” an exhibition at New York’s American Craft Museum. Scrims of nylon fabric were stretched from the floor to the ceiling, creating a softly enfolding space awash in colored light. Some visitors felt it was like walking into the spiraling chamber of a nautilus shell; others were reminded of a psychedelic trip.
During a summer trip to Ireland, Kasuba visited an ancient stone circle at Drombeg and experienced a kind of spatial epiphany. “I felt a sudden upsurge, as if the stone circle were boring into space, creating a twisting cylindrical shaft between the sky above and the ground under my feet,” she says. With this cyclonic uplift in mind, she returned to New York and attempted to recapture the experience with Live-In Environment (1971). She transformed one floor of a brownstone on West 90th Street into a series of seven amorphous areas, called space shelters, that reconfigured notions of home by combining primitive and space-age concepts. There would be no hierarchy of conventional spaces, no linear progressions, no straight walls or right-angled corners to constrict flow. Partitions made from translucent fabric membranes in glowing hues were held in place by wire hoops and strips of lattice. Rooms became uterine chambers; floors were covered with thick, earth-colored carpet. Kasuba had developed her own intuitive process of fabrication. “Not a single curve was willed,” she says. Instead, she waited for the material to tell her how to proceed: “Each shape acquired its volumetric expression as if of its own volition.”
One space, called Sensory, was a spiraling tube of fabric with a mirrored floor that reflected light from above. Here, one or two people could sit in contemplation and experience the changing spectrum of “color odors,” which were “conducted” by Danuté Anonis, a consulting chemist-perfumer, and accompanied by computer-generated sounds composed by Emmanuel Ghent. An adjacent area called Greenery was filled with plants and beds of thick moss. A gently sloping ramp led to the cavelike, Barbarella-esque Group Shelter; landscaped with pillows and shaggy rugs woven in deep blues and greens by Urban Jupena, the space could house a dozen people lounging on its squishy mounds and growing intimate around a mirror set into the floor as if it were a pond. At the far end of Kasuba’s fallopian maze was Sleeping Bower, which served as Kasuba’s bedroom: a domed chamber made from yak hair knitted into a cellular pattern by Silvia Heyden. One visitor likened it to the hive of an “exotic, heavenly insect.”
In the spring of 1972, Kasuba took her investigations outdoors. On the banks of a pond in Woodstock, New York, she and 14 students from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan fabricated a structure that recalled both a butterfly’s cocoon and a Native American teepee. As with her other soft environments, the process of construction was nonlinear and intuitive. She followed signals from the light, the wind, the natural elements of the site. “The shape was not preconceived,” Kasuba remembers. “The approach was spontaneous throughout.” A system of ropes, hoops, and wooden strips served as a loosely assembled armature for 10-by-40-foot swaths of nylon fabric. This time, tree trunks and branches provided structural integrity. Loose edges of fabric were sewn together by hand, and piles of stones anchored the fabric to the ground. A flap of cloth served as the front door. “The Woodstock project made me realize that tension is not an adversary but a silent partner,” says Kasuba. “It cannot possibly err.”
Over the next 20 years, Kasuba continued to develop her membrane theories through installations at museums and universities. At the State University of New York at Potsdam, she used fabric forms illuminated with fluorescent lights covered with blue and green Plexiglas. For her 20th Century Environment (1973), she transformed a gallery and rotunda inside the Carborundum Museum of Ceramics in Niagara Falls, New York: Fabric shapes were stretched between metal runners on the floor and plywood frames hung from the ceiling. In 1975, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, Kasuba created Spectral Passage, seven stretch-fabric environments lit from within and mounted in the museum’s main gallery. The shape of each structure was determined by a corresponding color. Red, for instance, produced a “round, swelling” space, while blue produced a “tall, crisp” form.
In 1997, following her husband’s death, Kasuba migrated once more—this time to the high desert of New Mexico. “It was like a whole new wind blowing,” she says. “I had exhausted the possibilities of New York.” On a car trip through California she noticed a group of odd rock formations cropping up near the Sierra Nevada mountains. Sitting in the passenger seat, she pulled out a sketchbook and started making drawings for a new kind of shelter. “All of the shapes I had done before suddenly found their landscape,” she says. “I needed rocks.”
In 2001, she purchased a 70-acre tract near the town of Estancia, or as she puts it, “in the middle of nowhere.” The land’s most conspicuous feature is a pile of red sandstone rocks not unlike those she saw in California. “I came out to build and live in isolation like a hermit,” she explains. “My closest neighbors are the coyotes, rattlesnakes, and road runners.”
Kasuba’s drawings for the site were transformed into three-dimensional models that featured arching walls topped by undulating, free-form roofs similar to the soft membranes of her early installations. But she still had to figure out how to transform the models into buildings. “Workmen would come by and say, ‘You don’t need a hammer, you need a needle and thread,’ ” she jokes.
The first dwelling to be built was her own house, set in the middle of the rock mound. She settled for a flat roof because she didn’t yet know how to build the complicated membrane roof the original drawings called for. “I needed a place to live,” she laments. Kasuba moved into the house in August 2002. A month later, her building crew broke ground for two experimental shell buildings located south of the main house: a semicircular kitchen building and an oblong studio/guest house.
“It gelled very slowly,” says Kasuba of how she developed a method for turning her ephemeral visions into solid, weatherproof shelters. First, concrete foundations were laid and shaped wood frames erected. Several wire cables were stretched from small oval-shaped roof plates and secured to the edges of the wood frames. Then, overlapping lengths of chicken wire held together with metal upholsterers’ hog rings were pulled and stretched between the frames to produce the undulating forms dictated by the arrangement of the frames.
The chicken wire was covered with wire mesh pre-pleated four-and-a-half-inches thick on the outside, and with felt-lined metal lath on the inside. Polyurethane foam was then sprayed onto the pleated mesh for insulating and waterproofing. Another layer of metal lath was laid over the foam and then covered by two coats of stucco. The interior walls were given two coats of plaster. Each successive layer further reinforced and strengthened the curving forms; the resulting shell was approximately seven inches thick.
The shells were finished by the fall of 2003, but it wasn’t until 2005 that Kasuba was able to clad the metal roofs. She used 54 sheets of aluminum that were cut with water jets into curved, uniform 48-by-18-inch bands and overlapped like shingles to accentuate the tensile forces of the sculptural forms.
In need of a drainage system, she leaned toward the decorative. “Here we will have gargoyles,” she told her builders, cupping her hands together to make a spout. And that’s exactly what they fabricated: At the lowest points of the roofs’ valleys, aluminum hands funnel and guide rushing rainwater to the ground. “I just thought, why not make hands,” says the artist. Now completed, the outbuildings rise up from the desert plane, their stucco walls painted the same color as the earth.
Surrounded by open wilderness, the glistening roofs of Kasuba’s home meet the sky, as if carrying on a secret dialogue. Their reflective sheathing is reminiscent of a pleated garment or an armadillo’s armor. But there is a hint of something else—something of another culture, another era. While for so many years Kasuba’s designs lit a path forward, here one can’t help but consider the 18th-century gables of her native Lithuania, as if she had explored so many mutations of a single idea only
to arrive, full-circle, exactly where she started.
“There are no big ideas here,” the designer claims. “It’s all quite simple.”
