Now Mark Wigley, in his minimalist volume based on discoveries he made in Wachsmann’s archive at Berlin’s Academy of Fine Arts, discusses the most elusive of the architect’s designs—the “Twisting-net.” In it, the differentiation between the nodes and the struts of the structure is dissolved, as shown in the Piranesian drawings he produced with his Chicago IIT students and exhibited for decades in a wide range of venues. Attention is also devoted to a vast horizontal cable structure conceived in the 1960s for the Civic Center of California City, a settlement begun in the Mojave Desert by developer Nathan Mendelsohn, which would have largely operated through television.

Wigley’s pocket-size book unveils this hitherto repressed face of Wachsmann, who shunned both wood and steel in order to operate in an immaterial world of visual and numeric data. In the early 1970s, television was invested by him with multiple potential virtues, as the vector for an interconnected society. Attracted by screens and computers, Wachsmann imagined new ways of transmitting energy and creating ever more ambitious spatial structures, for instance in his 1974 “Manifest for the Evolution of Assembling the Artificial Human Environment between Time and Space,” unearthed by Wigley. Wachsmann explored these ideas at the Division of Building Research he had created at the University of Southern California in 1966 with the blessing of Mies, while conceiving a television series about the environment that would allow citizen participation—and dissent. Wigley’s elegant and witty work considers the German-American’s research strategy and its reception, precisely inserted in the networks of Cold War modernism—from émigrés to emerging designers and theorists— subtly sculpting the portrait of a man he sees as a “wireless architect, or, more precisely, a post-architect.”