by Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!-A Paul Scheerbart Reader Josiah McElheny
doubts than he almost immediately discards them to rattle on with his
ever more grandiose ideas.
Scheerbart’s novel The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White, published
the same year as Glass Architecture, seems to mock the latter’s seemingly
tyrannical vision (as does an earlier novella, The Light Club of Batavia).
The fiction starts in Chicago, the city to which Berlin — Chicago on the
Spree — with its booming high-tech industry, was then so often compared.
13
CHRISTOPHER T U R N E R
Chicago was also the site of the 1893 World’s Fair, with its celebration
of an imagined technological future (the fair’s architecture inspired
Frank Baum’s Emerald City in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). The Glass
Architecturemanifesto could almost be interpreted as an appendix to The
Gray Cloth, a statement of intent written by the novel’s Swiss starchitect
hero, Herr Krug, an indefatigable evangelist of glass. Krug eccentrically
insists that his future wife sign a contract to wear only gray with 10
percent white so as not to compete with his iridescent glass architecture.
However, the novel mocks his absolute sartorial decree, and cracks soon
appear in his obsessive earnestness about the liberating effects of glass.
Though Scheerbart’s ideas were initially embraced by the Bauhaus
school, with which his legacy is often associated, he actually had little
in common with the Bauhaus brand of ascending modernism. For
Scheerbart, it was in the transcendent stained-glass windows of Gothic
cathedrals that he saw the first roots of glass architecture. The early
Bauhaus did, of course, follow him in attributing a similar spirituality
to glass, and on the cover of the 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto appeared a
woodcut by Lyonel Feininger of a medieval cathedral radiating beams of
light. The image evoked Gropius’s call for the Bauhaus to “collectively
desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future, which will
be everything in one structure: architecture and sculpture and painting,
which, from the million hands of craftsmen, will one day rise towards
heaven as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.”16 But by
1923, when Gropius sought to reinvent the Bauhaus as a technological
institute that designed cheap, mass-produced goods, Scheerbart and his
utopian mysticism of glass had been all but forgotten. Scheerbart urged
his readers to “resist most vehemently the undecorated ‘functional style,’
for it is inartistic.”17 His bejeweled aesthetic sensibility was closer to an
imaginary art nouveau — he didn’t think ornament a crime but a neces-
sity; concrete should be hidden behind decorative enamel, niello, mosaic,
and majolica, and an array of colored glass would create a shimmering
rainbow of refracted light. Transparency for him was not a metaphor for
political honesty, as it was for Hannes Meyer, who incorporated open
glass conference chambers in his 1926–27 designs for the Palace of the
League of Nations.
Scheerbart’s friend Bruno Taut, to whom Glass Architecture was dedi-
cated, created a glass monument to Scheerbart, the Glass House, a crystal
temple for the Cologne Werkbund of 1914, an exhibition intended to
showcase new building techniques. They had met through Herwarth
14
THE CRYSTAL VISION OF PAUL S C H E E R B A R T
Paul Scheerbart (far left) in the exhibition hall of the Glass House by Bruno Taut, Cologne
Werkbund Exhibition, 1914.
Walden’s Der Sturm group around 1912 and cemented their friendship
through Scheerbart’s hope to found a society of “glass architects.”18 The
pavilion with its prismatic glass-domed roof (known today only from
black-and-white photos) was the sole fruit of their collaboration. Taut’s
pavilion, unlike later transparent vivaria, was a sumptuous riot of color
in a spectrum ranging from dark blue through moss green to, at the point
of the dome, golden yellow. Aphoristic quotes about glass and crystal
culture written by Scheerbart were embedded in the exterior concrete
frieze, such as “Without a palace of glass, life is a burdensome task” and
“Colored glass destroys all hatred at last.”19
After Scheerbart’s death in 1915, Taut sketched out his mentor’s ideas,
such as the vision of glass cities in the Alps. He also formed the Crystal
Chain, a group of like-minded architects, artists, and poets who sought
to keep Scheerbart’s memory alive by further exploring his idealistic
visions of the future. They referred to Scheerbart as “Glass Papa.”20 Taut,
recognizing the intrinsic conservatism of adults, hoped that their children
would one day accept and live in a glass world. To this end, he designed a
modular construction toy — Dandanah, the Fairy Palace (1919)21— with
15
CHRISTOPHER T U R N E R
sixty-two glass bricks of different bold colors, which children could use
to experiment with Scheerbartian architectural schemes. “These master
builders see with emotion,” Taut wrote in a review of Glass Architecture,
“and when they are grown-ups they will build with and through us, even
if ‘we’ are already dead.”22
Unfortunately, after forty-three years of peace in Europe, World
War I cut short these crystal fantasies. Scheerbart, with characteristic
prescience, had foreseen the horror. In 1909 Zepplins first appeared
above Berlin, and the Wright brothers brought their flying machine to
Tempelhof, hoping to sell it to the Prussian Ministry of War. That same
year, Scheerbart published his pacifist tract The Development of Aerial
Militarism and the Demobilization of European Ground Forces, Fortresses,
and Naval Fleets. The German government, engaged in an arms race with
the rest of Europe, rejected the Wright brothers, believing that aerial war-
fare would be of negligible importance. Scheerbart, by contrast, argued
urgently in his text that the airship and the torpedoes it could carry would
change the field of battle forever. His underlying theme is the ultimate
folly of war, as there could be no defense against airborne armadas.
Some have said that Scheerbart starved himself to death to protest the
war; others claim, more plausibly, that he died of alcoholism. He was a
passionate antimilitarist and, with black humor, ridiculed the Wilhelmine
weapons race. Cities could no longer be defended using traditional tech-
niques, and a small state was therefore as militarily powerful as a big one.
War was thus futile, and the only option was to demobilize and accept
the blurring of national borders. Scheerbart invoked the “much-ridiculed
utopia” of the United States of Europe. “Faced with a dynamite war, this
utopia becomes a much more realizable thing,” he wrote, “soon losing
its comical side.”23 Even in the face of a war to end all wars, Scheerbart,
a skeptical visionary of better worlds, saw a silver lining.
16
THE CRYSTAL VISION OF PAUL S C H E E R B A R T
NOTES
1. Paul Scheerbart and John A. Stuart, The Gray Cloth: Paul Scheerbart’s Novel on Glass
Architecture (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2001), xvii. Stuart’s source is Mechthild
Rausch’s biography Von Danzig ins Weltall: Paul Scheerbarts Anfangsjahre 1863–1895
(Munich: edition text + kritik, 1997).
2. Quoted in Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart’s Vision: Utopian
Aspects of German Expressionist Architecture” (PhD diss. Columbia University,
1973), 88. Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Erinnerungen an das literarische Berlin (Munich:
Winkler-Verlag, 1965), 129.
3. Bletter, “Bruno Taut,” 93.
4. Quoted in Bletter, “Bruno Taut,” 92. Else Harke, “Nachwort,” in Paul Scheerbart,
Dichterische Hauptwerke (Stuttgart: Henry Goverts Verlag, 1962), 730.
5. Quoted in Bletter, “Bruno Taut,” 92. Erich Mühsam, Namen und Menschen-
Unpolitische Erinnerungen, ed. Fritz Adolf Hünich (Leipzig: Volk-und Buch-Verlag,
1949), 80.
6. “Scheerbartania,” in Mühsam, Namen und Menschen-Unpolitische Erinnerungen, ed.
Hünich.
7. Ibid.
8. Quoted in Bletter, “Bruno Taut,” 139. Paul Scheerbart, “Die Phantastik in der
Malerei,” Freie Bühne 2 (1891): 290.
9. Quoted in Bletter, “Bruno Taut,” 5. Herwarth Walden, “Paul Scheerbart” [obituary],
Der Sturm 6, nos. 17–18 (December 1915): 96.
10. Hans Richter, Dada, Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 120.
11. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2003), 387.
12. Walter Gropius in a letter to the artist Herman Finsterlin, April 17, 1919, quoted in
Marcel Franciscono, Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The
Ideas and Artistic Theories of Its Founding (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971),
124n93.
13. This book, Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, 26.
14. Ibid., 76.
15. Paul Scheerbart, The Development of Aerial Militarism and the Demobilization of
European Ground Forces, Fortresses, and Naval Fleets: A Flyer, trans. M. Kasper, Lost
Literature Series 4 (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007), 12.
16. Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 64.
17. This book, Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, 35.
18. Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “Paul Scheerbart’s Architectural Fantasies,” Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians 34, no. 2 (May 1975): 83–97.
19. This book, Scheerbart, “Glass House Letters,” 135–37.
20. This book, Taut, “Glass Architecture,” 121, and Scheerbart, “Glass House Letters,” 142.
21. See illustration, this book, 122.
22. This book, Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, 121.
23. Scheerbart, Development of Aerial Militarism, 17.
17
Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture) by Paul Scheerbart was published by Verlag
der Sturm in late May 1914 two months before the July opening of Bruno
Taut’s Glass House at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition. The translation by
James Palmes is reproduced here with British spelling and phrasing retained
as published in 1972 in “Glass Architecture” by Paul Scheerbart and “Alpine
Architecture” by Bruno Taut, Dennis Sharp, editor, Praeger Publishers (New York).
Glass Architecture is illustrated in this book with photographic details of
installations by Josiah McElheny, selected by the artist. For a list of works see
page 318.
20
Dedicated to
Bruno Taut
Honi soit qui mal y pense
Synopsis of Chapters
page
1 Environment and its influence on the development of culture . . . . . . . 26
2 The veranda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
3 The Botanical Gardens at Dahlem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
4 Double glass wal s, light, heating and cooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
5 The iron skeleton and the reinforced concrete skeleton . . . . . . . . . . 30
6 The inner framework of glass surfaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
7 The avoidance of wood in furniture and interior decoration . . . . . . . 32
8 The furniture in the middle of the room . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
9 The larger veranda and its independence of the main building . . . . . . 33
10 Garden houses and pavilions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11 Stone flags and majolica on garden paths. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
12 Magnesite and the perfect floor covering for the house . . . . . . . . . . 34
13 The functional style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
14 The cladding of building materials and its justification . . . . . . . . . . 36
15 The finishing and plastic treatment of reinforced concrete . . . . . . . . 37
16 Enamel and niel o applied to metal panels on reinforced concrete. . . . . 37
17 Glass fibres in applied art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
18 The beauty of the Earth, when glass architecture is everywhere . . . . . 38
19 Gothic cathedrals and castles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
20 Ancient Greece without glass, the East with ampullæ and majolica tiles . 40
21 Glass, enamel, majolica and porcelain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
22 The ef ects of Tif any. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
23 The avoidance of the quicksilver ef ects of mirrors. . . . . . . . . . . . 41
24 The avoidance of figure-representation in architecture . . . . . . . . . . 41
25 The landscape architect and the tree and plant world in the
Rococo period. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
26 The door . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
27 The chair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
28 Metal in art and applied art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
29 Hol ow glass elements in every possible colour and form as a wal
material (the so-cal ed ‘glass-brick’) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
30 Aschinger’s buildings in Berlin, 1893 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
31 Glass mosaic and reinforced concrete . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
32 Heating and cooling appliances in special columns, vases, suspended
elements, etc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
33 Lighting between the double wal s (which does not exclude suspended
fittings in the room). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
23
34 The vacuum-cleaner — in the park, too — also as an insect-exterminator . . 50
35 Ventilators, which are ousting the customary windows . . . . . . . . . . 51
36 Light columns and light towers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
37 Direction-finding for aeronautics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
38 Ukley mother-of-pearl on the concrete wal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
39 Wired glass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
40 The vertical in architecture, and how to overcome it . . . . . . . . . . . 53
41 The developments made possible by iron construction . . . . . . . . . . 53
42 Movable partitions in the home and the park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
43 Overcoming the danger of fire . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . 54
44 Vanquishing vermin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
45 Floodlights in the park, on towers and house-roofs . . . . . . . . . . . 55
46 Getting rid of the usual il umination effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
47 The end of the window; the loggia and the balcony . . . . . . . . . . . 56
48 Stone mosaic as paving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
49 Models for glass architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
50 Mountain il umination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
51 Park il umination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
52 Ghostly il umination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
53 The solid wal as background for sculpture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
54 Cars, motor boats and coloured glass. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
55 The steam and electric railway lit up in colour . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
56 Nature in another light . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
57 Reinforced concrete in water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
58 Floating architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
59 River and lake shipping in coloured lighting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
60 Aircraft with coloured lights. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
61 Reinforced concrete and the architecture of fences. . . . . . . . . . . . 65
62 Terraces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
63 View-points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
64 Glass in factory buildings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
65 Market hal s entirely of glass and iron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
66 Churches and temples. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
67 Club and sports buildings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
68 Militarism and brick architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
69 Parliament buildings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
70 Restaurants, cafés, hotels and sanatoria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
71 Transportable buildings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
72 The future inventor, and the materials which could compete with glass . . 70
73 The timelessness of ornamental glass and glass mosaic. . . . . . . . . . 71
