Paul Scheerbart

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  glass buildings are displayed in the glass hal , along with examples of old

  German, Venetian, English, Tif any, and handcrafted glass. Max Taut’s

  model for a botanical museum (made by Weinert-Steglitz), several of my

  own sketches, and Leberecht Migge’s design for a glass garden show that

  Paul Scheerbart’s poetic and wonderful proposal cannot be dismissed as

  mere utopianism. In fact, there is a wel -founded hope that viewing glass

  architecture wil awaken an enthusiasm for its more subtle charms. Current

  architecture desperately needs to be freed from depressing, immobile, clichéd

  monumentality. This can only be achieved by flowing, artistic lightness.

  Translated by Anne Posten

  104

  Contributors

  Construction management: Franz Hof mann (Taut Brothers & Hof mann, architects, Berlin W 9. Linkstraße 20

  Construction

  Al gemeine Beton- und Eisengesel schaft m. b. H., Al concrete work

  Berlin W 57, Bülowstr. 55

  Deutsches Luxfer Prismen-Syndikat, Berlin SW 68, Ceiling and floor of the domed hal , outer wal s of the

  Friedrichstr. 204

  basement, glass stairs

  Vereinigte Zwieseler und Pirnaer Farbenglaswerke Wal s and ceiling of the cascade room, cascade and

  A. G., Munich, Briennerstr. 9

  border

  J. Schmidt, (Official purveyor to the Kaiser), Berlin Inner wal and ceiling of ornament room in basement W, Genthinerstr. 3

  Vereinigte Werkstätten für Mosaik und Glasmalerei, Inside wal s of ornament room in basement

  Puhl & Wagner, Gottfr. Heinersdorf, Berlin-

  Treptow

  N. Rosenfeld & Co., Berlin W 8, Mohrenstr. 11

  Floor and stairs of cascade room

  Deutsche Gasglühlicht A.-G. (Auergesel schaft), Instal ation and lighting with Osram half-watt lamps

  Berlin O 17, Rotherstr. 8-10

  and Osram color-reflect lamps

  Master Glassmaker Adolf Baltrusch, Berlin N, Mirroring in dome

  Bornholmerstr. 76

  Robert Oertling, Fabrik kompletter Geschäftsein-

  Glass display cases

  richtungen für al e Branchen, Cottbus

  H. Scharrer & Koch, Bayreuth, Bavaria

  Colored glass beads for cascade

  Ed. Liesegang, Fabrik optischer Apparate, Düssel-

  Kaleidoscope and projection equipment

  dorf, Volmerswerterstr. 21

  Jakob Ochs, Gartenbau, Hamburg, Bieberhaus

  Glass spheres

  J. G. Sauter, Metal ornamentenfabrik, Kupertrei-

  Balustrades

  berei, Cologne-Sülz

  E. de la Sauce & Kloß, Eisenkonstruktion, Berlin- Lattice grating

  Lichtenberg, Herzbergstr.

  White, Child & Beney, Siroccowerk, Berlin NW, Ventilation system

  Dorotheenstr. 35

  Weise Söhne, Hal e a. d. Saale, Berlin branch, Kaiser Centrifugal pump for cascade

  Wilhelmstr. 59

  Dr. Max Levy, Fabrik elektrischer Maschinen und Motors for pumps and kaleidoscope

  Apparate, Berlin, Mül erstr. 30

  Deutsches Metal warenwerk G. m. b. H., Berlin, Light fixtures in dome (not including lamps)

  Lindenstr. 106

  Artists

  Franz Mutzenbecher, Berlin W, Eisenacherstr. 103

  Main glazing in ornament room

  Professor Emanuel Margold, Darmstadt

  Glazing in ornament room

  Professor Arno Körnig, Bromberg

  Richard Schischke, Berlin

  Charlotte Leyden, Berlin

  Wil i Titze, Hamburg

  Hans Unger, Berlin

  Emil Weinert, Berlin-Steglitz, Hardenbergstr. 36

  Wal decorations in cascade room

  Franz Mutzenbecher, Berlin

  Contents of kaleidoscope

  Professor Adolf Hölzel, Stuttgart, and others

  Exhibitors in Glass Hal

  Georg Leykauf, Nuremberg, Kunstgewerbehaus

  Tiffany Glass

  Richard L. F. Schulz, Berlin, Bel evuestr

  Venetian, German, and English Glass

  Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk, Handcrafted Glass

  Berlin, Bel evuestr. 5 a

  Emil Weinert, Berlin-Steglitz, Hardenbergstr. 36

  Model of botanical museum

  Firms that participate in construction

  Glass construction materials and samples

  105

  The rhyming couplet that closes this brochure, OHNE EINEN GLASPALAST

  IST DAS LEBEN EINE LAST (Without a palace of glass / Life is a burdensome

  task), is one of the Paul Scheerbart mottoes encircling the base of the dome of

  the Glass House. Scheerbart’s letters to Taut regarding these mottoes were later

  published by Taut in Frühlicht (Early light) magazine in 1920 and are included

  in this book (pages 130–43).

  Overleaf: The Glass House by Bruno Taut, Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914. Note the

  last few words of the Scheerbart motto from the brochure opposite just below the dome on

  the left-hand side of the building.

  107

  BRU NO TAUT

  THE CRYSTAL VISION OF PAUL S C H E E R B A R T

  NOAM M. ELCOTT

  Noam M. Elcott

  “Kaleidoscope-Architecture”:

  Scheerbart, Taut, and the Glass House

  “The Glass House has no purpose [Zweck] other than to be beautiful.”1

  With these words the architect Bruno Taut commenced his promotional

  pamphlet for his glass industry promotional pavilion. Where stained

  glass once propagandized church teachings and divine light, Taut’s Glass

  House showcased a host of new, often proprietary construction mate-

  rials, not least Luxfer Prisms, an innovative type of glass tiles that, as

  their name announced, carried light into the dark recesses of rooms.2

  Purposelessness — to adapt Kant’s famous definition of beauty — acquired

  purpose as exhibition architecture. Taut’s portentous prose and industry

  backing notwithstanding, the architect had his sights set on goals loftier

  than patented building materials or even a universal sense of beauty. For

  the structure was dedicated to Paul Scheerbart, that inscrutable evan-

  gelist of glass, and was emblazoned with the poet’s maxims: rhyming

  couplets — “Colored glass / destroys all hatred at last” was inscribed above

  the entrance — too direct to be mystical and too romantic to be function-

  alist. In its debt to Scheerbart, the Glass House oriented its temporary

  inhabitants toward the uncharted utopia of glass architecture.3 Beauty

  and functionality were but facets of this new prismatic culture.

  Taut and others described in detail one’s passage through the Glass

  House. Concrete steps led to a terrace; walls of Luxfer Prisms enclosed

  the interior; two iron staircases, outfitted with Luxfer glasses, ascended

  The Glass House by Bruno Taut, Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914. Interior view showing

  the domed exhibition hall and the railed oculus opening into the cascade room below. An

  exhibition including historical Venetian, German, and British glass; contemporary examples

  of Tiffany and German glass; a model of a botanical museum inspired by Scheerbart’s writings;

  and samples provided by the glass industries involved in the construction of the Glass House

  of the most recent developments in glass architectural materials were showcased in the vitrines

  surrounding the oculus. The dome of the Glass House was constructed of colored and clear

  glass, but little i
s known about the colors themselves except that, as Taut described, there were

  “reflections of light whose colors began at the base with a dark blue and rose up through moss

  green and golden yellow to culminate at the top in a luminous pale yellow.”

  111

  NOAM M. ELCOTT

  The Glass House by Bruno Taut, Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914. Interior view from the

  lower part of the cascade room with the oculus to the exhibition hall visible at the top of the

  cascade. Taut’s brochure credits the many artists, artisans, and companies that provided the

  experimental construction materials, glass prisms and brick, stained glass, metalized ceramic

  tiles, glass globes, and other new uses of glass and concrete documented in the installation

  views illustrating this essay (see page 105).

  to the Glass Hall or cupola; an opening in its floor descended into a base-

  ment with walls of silver and gold glass furnished by the firm Puhl &

  Wagner, a cascade waterfall assembled by United Zwieseler and Pirnaer

  Colored Glass Works, and, strangely, a darkened niche for kaleidoscopic

  projections. The commercial and utopian aspirations of glass industrialists

  and evangelists culminated paradoxically in an obscure niche whose dark

  drapery swallowed the light carried inward and downward by Luxfer

  Prisms so as to enhance the brilliance of the infinitely variable and varie-

  gated forms rear-projected onto a milky glass screen by a giant projecting

  kaleidoscope.4 The inclusion of a milky glass screen was sensible on com-

  mercial and aesthetic grounds. The glass industry was promoting dulled

  and silvered plate-glass projection surfaces — in short, mirror-screens! — as

  a more luminous alternative to painted canvas or plaster film screens.5 And

  Scheerbart himself had recently announced the imminent arrival of glass

  theater, featuring glass sheets of no more than 2 to 3 meters [61⁄2–9 feet]

  in width.6 (The Glass House’s glass screen measured a tolerable 120 cm

  112

  “K ALEIDOSCOPE-A RCHITECT U R E”

  The Glass House by Bruno Taut, Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914. Interior view showing

  the upper part of the cascade room. Among the list of collaborators are a number of electri-

  cal and technology companies (including the famous Osram Lighting Corporation) and the

  companies providing the motors and pumps for the cascade, whose rushing water formed a

  soundtrack for the artistic images displayed by the kaleidoscope.

  [4 feet] across.) The curiosity lay instead in the kaleidoscope, which pro-

  duced the last images consumed by visitors before they exited the Glass

  House. Why crown a glass pavilion with projected, abstract moving images?

  A first answer might again be gleaned from Taut’s pamphlet: “The

  Glass House has no purpose other than to be beautiful.” The glass bead

  filling of the kaleidoscope was assembled by artists — not least Franz

  Mutzenbecher and Adolf Hölzel, both significant, if not highly success-

  ful artists; Hölzel, in particular, was an influential teacher of younger

  abstract painters. Here, perhaps, was the fulfillment of purposive pur-

  poselessness: even though chance played a role, artists could still create

  individualized works. Alternatively, the achievements were of a techno-

  logical kind. As Taut avowed, visitors might remember the kaleidoscope

  from childhood, but here was a larger projection version, indeed the first

  successful projection kaleidoscope. The assertion was, at best, half right.

  Earlier attempts at projection kaleidoscopes may have met with varying

  degrees of success, but they date back to the invention of the apparatus.

  113

  NOAM M. ELCOTT

  Sir David Brewster, a nineteenth-century scientist who vastly improved

  the stereoscope and invented the kaleidoscope, enumerated its applica-

  tion to the magic lantern, solar microscope, and camera obscura: “It is

  by no means difficult to fit it [the kaleidoscope] up in such a manner as

  to exhibit them [the pictures] upon a wall to any number of spectators.”7

  Once again, Taut’s exploits cannot easily be restricted to artistic whimsy

  or techno-commercial utility. A third way was initiated by Scheerbart.

  Scheerbart had long admired kaleidoscopic effects and peppered

  his prose with the moniker. Comets and stars, color and light-plays,

  appeared like “a perpetually spinning kaleidoscope.”8 A fictional World’s

  Exposition in Melbourne boasted “kaleidoscopic ornamentation.”9 But

  in the years just prior to the Werkbund Exhibition that hosted the Glass

  House, Scheerbart described in detail a fictional glass exhibition in Peking

  that closely anticipated the kaleidoscopic ensemble produced by Taut and

  company. “To begin, a hall with kaleidoscopes on the walls. Everything

  else black velvet. In the middle of the sixteen walls, however, appeared

  a large circle with kaleidoscopic effects. The kaleidoscope transformed

  every minute. Always different. Every magic lantern overhead, above

  the black velvet ceiling.”10 With the perfunctory shift from front to rear

  projection, Scheerbart’s 1912 fantasy described almost perfectly the dis-

  position of elements at the terminus of the Glass House circuit. A dozen

  years prior, at the turn of the century, Scheerbart had named this dispo-

  sition with a terminological precision matched only by Taut’s later design:

  “kaleidoscope-architecture.”11 For Scheerbart, kaleidoscope-architecture

  was but one of many half-rhymes for the glass architecture he system-

  atically and devoutly prophesied. But it behooves us to take the term

  seriously and literally in regard to Taut’s Glass House. Already Brewster,

  the inventor of the kaleidoscope, had envisioned kaleidoscopic images

  enlarged with the help of magic lanterns and other devices. Taut and

  Scheerbart recognized the power and potential of expanding not only

  the image but also the apparatus, so as to create a kaleidoscope one could

  enter. The raked steps, darkened niche, luminous screen, and moving

  images channeled nineteenth-century attractions like the diorama and

  Rear view of the Glass House by Bruno Taut, Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914. Note

  the last words of the Scheerbart motto DAS LICHT WILL DURCH DAS GANZE ALL UND IST

  LEBENDIG IM KRISTALL (Light passes through the universe / And comes to life in crystal)

  beneath the dome, as well as the epigraph to Scheerbart’s Glass Architecture, Honi soit qui

  mal y pense (Shamed be he who thinks evil of it), inscribed beneath the row of mirrored glass

  globes.

  114

  “K ALEIDOSCOPE-A RCHITECT U R E”

  coincided with the emergent architectural form of cinemas. The Glass

  House, in short, was kaleidoscope-architecture in its most literal — that

  is, etymological — sense: καλός (kalos, beautiful), εἶδος (eidos, a form),

  and σκοπέω (skope¯o, to see).12 A machine for seeing, the Glass House did

  not oppose purpose and beauty. Rather, to amend Taut’s declaration, the

  Glass House had no purpose other than the viewing of beautiful forms.

  NOTES

  1. Bruno Taut, “Glashaus: Werkbund-Ausstellung Cöln 1914” (1914). This book, Taut,

  “Glass House Colog
ne Werkbund Exhibition,” 101.

  2. The Luxfer Prism Company was founded in Chicago in 1897 and quickly established

  locally owned syndicates in several countries, including Germany. Among its first

  designers was the young Frank Lloyd Wright. The German Luxfer Prism Company

  produced the glass prisms for Taut’s Werkund project and for The Fairy Palace

  (1919–20), his children’s game in glass.

  3. See, most immediately, Scheerbart’s contemporaneous treatise: Paul Scheerbart, Glass

  Architecture, trans. James Palmes (New York: Praeger, 1972). This book, 22–90.

  4. Taut later described the apparatus as a “großprojizierten Kaleidoskop,” a description

  from which “projecting” was inexplicably dropped in the contemporaneous English

  translation. Bruno Taut, Die neue Baukunst in Europa und Amerika (Stuttgart:

  J. Hoffmann, 1929), 28; Bruno Taut, Modern Architecture (London: Studio, 1929), 56.

  5. See, for example, Frank Herbert Richardson, Motion Picture Handbook (New York:

  Moving Picture World, 1916), 173. These glass screens were for front, not rear,

  projection. Accordingly, the promotional value of the milky glass screen in the Glass

  House, which employed rear projection, was admittedly nominal.

  6. See Paul Scheerbart, “Das Glas-Theater,” Die Gegenwart 78 (1910): 914. This book,

  Scheerbart, “The Glass Theater,” 187.

  7. David Brewster, The Kaleidoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction, 2nd ed.

  (London: John Murray, 1858), 117.

  8. Paul Scheerbart, Kometentanz: Astrale Pantomine in Zwei Aufzüge (Leipzig: Insel-

  Verlag, 1903), 42.

  9. Paul Scheerbart, Münchhausen und Clarissa (Berlin: Oesterheld, 1906), 29.

  10. Paul Scheerbart, “Auf der Glasausstellung in Peking,” in Das große Licht: Ein

  Münchhausen-Brevier (Leipzig: Sally Rabinowitz, 1912), 94–95. This book, Scheerbart,

  “At the Glass Exhibition in Peking: The Old Baron’s Diary Entries,” 200.

  11. Paul Scheerbart, “Die wilde Jagd: Ein Entwicklungsroman in acht anderen

  Geschichten,” in Rakkóx der Billonär und Die wilde Jagd (Berlin: Insel-Verlag,

  1900), 97. Enticing precedents for kaleidoscope architecture include the improbable

  convergence of “Oriental” and glass architecture in a replica of the Alhambra’s

  Hall of Abencerrages, presented in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham; according to

 

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