Paul Scheerbart
Page 10
contemporary sources, both the replica and its glass container were experienced as
giant kaleidoscopes. See Arnaud Maillet, “Kaleidoscopic Imagination,” Grey Room 48
(2012): 46.
12. Brewster, The Kaleidoscope: 1.
Hand-drawn plan of Bruno Taut’s Glass House. Note the custom-built kaleidoscope and
motorized projector at the rear of building, the 4-foot (1.2 meter) screen just in front of the
projector, and the special recess used to darken the viewing space in front of the screen. The
Glass House projector has previously been misidentified as a cinematograph but was a possi-
bly unique motion-producing kaleidoscope with a lamp for projecting the images created by
artists, a visual program commissioned by Taut specifically for this project.
117
“Glasarchitektur” by Bruno Taut was published March 1921 in Die Glocke (The
bell), the German socialist journal edited by the historian and economist Max
Beer from 1919 to 1921. Writing in response to the growing interest in architec-
ture made of glass, Taut attempted to record the history of his collaboration with
his “Glass Papa,” Paul Scheerbart. Taut hoped to remind people of the central
historical importance of Scheerbart’s ideas, especially as a source of inspiration
for his own group of architects and writers, the soon to disband Crystal Chain.
Published in the midst of the German Revolution, with the country on the brink
of a civil war, Taut’s essay can also be seen as a defense of the political ideals
inherent in Scheerbart’s vision for a translucent, colored glass architecture, a
world view central to the work of both Taut and Scheerbart.
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Bruno Taut
Glass Architecture
Dear Editors:
You seek from the notorious glass architect an historical account of glass
architecture, this “foible” for which al are so eager to take him to task. Glass
architecture: seemingly a matter of materials, comparable to wood or stone
architecture. But this is a complete misunderstanding: from a spatial per-
spective, architecture or building is nothing other than the bringing of light.
Glass is light itself, and wood and stone architecture have always striven to
bring light, so “glass architecture” is nothing more than the final link in the
chain of building. The history of glass architecture is therefore the history
of architecture itself.
For us, the prominent use of glass and its preeminence among materials
is so obvious that it hardly bears discussion. But today –isms are the fash-
ion, and nothing can happen without being a “school” or a trend. In the
last centuries, concrete and iron have provided easy ways to play with form,
and yet now, when the most exquisite of al materials is in ready circula-
tion, such play is cal ed a foible. The Gothic masters worked in the glass
crucibles of huts and experimented with the ultimate possibilities of flow
and had no concrete or iron, only stone, and they stretched light between
grids of stone.
“But, before the glass is made, the architect, by his knowledge of arrange-
ment, makes the stone framework like a filter in the waves of God’s Light
and gives to the whole edifice its individual lustre, as to a pearl.”
(Paul Claudel: L’Annonce faite à Marie)
This is where the history of real glass architecture begins.
Paul Scheerbart cal ed the Gothic cathedral the prelude to glass archi-
tecture. In truth: what we want is more than the mounting of panes in a
framework. The most magnificent example of that to date was London’s
Crystal Palace of 1853. Giant greenhouses are also beautiful, and I should
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BRU NO TAUT
in no way be counted an opponent of greenhouse cultivation. What beckons
us, and what Scheerbart anticipated, however, is actual construction with
glass — an uncomfortable prospect that “we” wil nonetheless make into a
comfortable reality. Concrete and iron as a framework wil not disappear,
but this “framework” wil shrink in proportion to the glass prisms — thick,
stonelike forms bound with a little cement and thin iron bars into a honey-
comblike tissue, creating a wal truly made of glass. Stones can be thrown
at such a wal and only the proverb breaks; here the ful reality of glass
architecture is born. It is an unpleasant idea for skat players in their cozy
hideaways. But this is the ful reality of the idea, and it is with this idea that
the history of glass architecture begins.
Writing this history means writing poetry. Scheerbart’s writings, and
his Glass Architecture in particular, are this history and my utopias. This
history of what is to come is no more a fantasy than our hindsight into a past
on which the lamp of the present casts only a smal beam of light. Cogito
ergo sum. I am what I think; what I think is my present. And this present
can do anything, it can move mountains! Therefore onward! Down with the
ghost of the past and its lead “weight,” up with our will. “O thoughts of men
accurs’d! Past and to come seems best; things present, worst.”
The present: not what we’ve built, but what we build, and if at this
moment we cannot physical y build that which we desire (which, by the
way, is a blessing for us), it is nonetheless building in us and wil therefore
eventual y have to manifest itself in material. What has already been built
of glass is legion: buildings for exhibitions, huge glass wal s in industrial
buildings, warehouses, and al the merry, colorful glass kitsch of verandas,
stores, Aschinger taverns, pastry shops, etc. Both inside and outside the
Werkbund there are two distinct paths in current building that lead toward
the architecture of light: the practical industrial dictate of plentiful light,
and the blithe sensual thril of colorful kitsch and multifaceted glitter. I
have tried to unite both these trends in the Glass House in Cologne; I
have tried to replace the cold light of a greenhouse with the warm, lively
light of architectural space. Of course, the Glass House was only a smal
stepping stone. In order to depict the richness of the light-sounds — from
organ fugue to the most delicate solo capriccio — in the endless variations
of wal forms: straight, cambered, by no means always vertical, I would
need many sizes of bel s, likewise to discuss the various technical problems
that they create. But we do not wish to proselytize, nor can we; we too are
building and sitting at our glass crucibles. In glass we lay our souls and
capture yours, they fly to this mystery of creation, which knows no back or
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G L A S S A R C H I T E C T U R E
front but sparkles from al sides, ever anew, like moths to a flame. Be cap-
tured! “The more thou art a prisoner, the more wilt thou be freed.” Being
captured is painful. But pain is the creator. Each new creation hurts, and
it hurts the true artist the most, since he can do nothing but create anew,
draw from the wel of “creation.”
“It is unfamiliar, therefore it is disturbing.” These are the words of a
reviewer who is rarely honest and just as rarely humble, on my proscenium
; for “The Maid of Orleans.” And that was only latticework, panes between
slats, hardly very new and yet — unfamiliar!
Yes, that dear comfortable familiarity! But that too must be, that too is
“wil ed by God.” The stone of difficulty only creates livelier sparks. And
we have a “great” al y here: in children. Children rejoice in the festival of
light, and women with them — perhaps not always, but whenever the um-
bilical cord isn’t quite broken. And we win over children, who have been
thrust into this cold, joyless life, through play. Our building is play: “our
goal is the play of style.” And we make children into our master builders
with real playthings (for example my glass construction kits with colorful,
nearly unbreakable glass blocks). These master builders see with emotion,
and when they are grown-ups they wil build with and through us, even if
“we” are already dead.
Dear editors, do not take al this “seriously.” I wish the same for the
readers. It is real y unimportant whether this is said and written. Things
are only truly important when they are said for the fun of it. And therefore
al should read the works of our “Glass Papa,” Paul Scheerbart.
Yours most faithfully,
Bruno Taut
Translated by Anne Posten
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Rosemarie Haag Bletter
Fragments of Utopia:
Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut
Paul Scheerbart’s direct impact on the arc of modernist architectural
history — especially through his friend the architect Bruno Taut — is in-
disputable. During the early 1960s, the proliferation of utopian archi-
tectural groups like Archigram and the Japanese Metabolists marked a
reemergence of an antirationalist undercurrent of modernism that had
been completely displaced by the emphasis on rationalism in the work
of historians such as Sigfried Giedion.1
The widely varying interpretations of the new aesthetic concepts
across the arts in the years leading up to World War I — many of them
inspired by anarchist and poetic ideals — were later subsumed under a
category mostly associated with expressionist painting. Marxist critics
have tended to dismiss these explorations as primarily self-expression
and, for this presumed reason, not meaningful socially. But especially
in architecture, these developments and visionary proposals were in fact
often focused on social ideals. At the outset I also need to distinguish
my understanding of Scheerbart from that of the British critic Reyner
Banham, who in his early appreciation of the writer’s importance for
architecture, “The Glass Paradise” (1959), concentrates exclusively on
his technological visions rather than his quirky fantasy.2 In fact, most
of Scheerbart’s work provides an untamed blend of symbolist mysticism
and synesthesia combined with dry wit, satire, and irreverent brevity.
Most important, Scheerbart underscores the sensuous, emotive expe-
rience of architecture, while at the same time he narrates his topics with
Bruno Taut, Dandanah — The Fairy Palace, 1919–29. A set of colored glass building blocks.
These hand-cast, rough-surfaced glass blocks in clear, red, blue, green, and yellow, were
manufactured by the same company that produced the prismatic glass tiles of the Glass House
of 1914, the Deutsches Luxfer Prismen-Syndikat, a franchise of The Luxfer Prism Company
in Chicago (originally called The Radiating Light Company). With child-friendly edges and
charming dappled refractions from marks made by the metal molds, these glass blocks match
the soft color palette of Taut’s watercolors for his portfolio and book Alpine Architecture of
1919 and likely reflect as well the palette of colors used in the original Glass House prism tiles.
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ROSEM A R I E H A AG BLETTER
a sharp sense of irony and a political skepticism typical of the anarchist
groups active in Berlin before World War I.3 Because most of his novels
and short stories depict an architect or architectural fantasy as the central
catalyst for a new society, his import for the utopian phase of architec-
tural design just after World War I, when there were few commissions
to build, is understandable.
In order to suggest a transformed society, Scheerbart uses imagery
of mobility and ever-changing translucent polychrome effects. This is
not the clear glass associated with rationalist modernism but glass that
incorporates mysterious, dislocating qualities, produced by a multiplicity
of reflective surfaces and settings that can be colored glass, gold, moving
water, or even precious stones. Although Scheerbart’s architectural con-
ceptions seem modern in their mutability, some relate to art nouveau’s
interest in the ephemeral as a critique of the commercial, materialistic,
and technocentric culture of the second half of the nineteenth century.
Contributing to Scheerbart’s preoccupation with glass is a long liter-
ary prehistory rooted in an ancient Judeo-Arabic tradition (Scheerbart
had studied Arabic culture) that was indebted to one of the apocryphal
biblical accounts of the queen of Sheba when she was invited to visit King
Solomon’s palace in Jerusalem. In addition to having great power and
wealth, the queen was rumored to have magical powers, and in order to
reveal that, Solomon had a glass floor built in his throne room so that
she would mistakenly perceive this as a pool of water and lift her skirt,
exposing her legs. A sorceress was assumed to have hairy legs (a sign of
the occult, but in reality also a sign of male power), and lifting her skirt
would betray the hidden reason for her exceptional might as a ruler. In
this suggestively eroticized tale, King Solomon, widely renowned for
his wisdom, absorbs Sheba’s magical prowess for himself. Solomon is
said to have then created an underwater dome of glass and an aerial city
of crystal.4
This fantastical tradition is carried on in Arabic architecture and
poetry. It enters medieval stories associated with the search for the Holy
Grail and becomes reified in actual buildings with the stained-glass win-
dows of the Gothic cathedral. By contrast, the courtly literature of the
later Middle Ages depicts the quest for the Stone of Wisdom and courtly
love as a personal transformation. The imagery of architecture as a social
agent disappears, replaced by a luminous, usually transparent stone that
is discovered in the depth of a cave or a mountain. The allegory is used in
this reduced form, as a translucent pebble that stands for the self, in the
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FR AGMENTS OF UTOPIA
romantic literature of Novalis, in Nietzsche, and in the symbolist work of
Alfred Jarry. In Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll (1895),
the philosopher’s stone is located in Vincent van Gogh’s brain. This fable,
inspired in part by Rosicrucian mysticism, also uses the story of the queen
of Sheba and King Solomon, demonstrating that these apocryphal bib-
lical stories had regained currency in the 1890s.5 In Scheerbart’s works
and later in the designs of Taut, and other underrecognized architects
becomes less personal and again more social: the imagery returns to the
architectonic realm.
Among Scheerbart’s longer texts, The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White:
A Ladies Novel is more characteristic of his allegorical style than is the
better-known Glass Architecture, both of 1914.6 It depicts the world trans-
formed by a master architect through colored glass structures together
with the gradual liberation of the architect’s wife, who is in the end freed
from the prenuptial contract that required her to wear only gray dresses
with a few white details so that she did not clash with her husband’s
polychrome buildings. In a sense, Gray Cloth is a sly protofeminist novel.
Several of Scheerbart’s works demonstrate his integration of mobil-
ity as social alternative: “Transportable Cities,” “Dynamite War and
Decentralization,” and The Development of Aerial Militarism and the
Demobilization of European Ground Forces, Fortresses, and Naval Fleets,
all of 1909.7 In these short stories he suggests the decentralization of cities
into smaller garden-cities as a pacifist, defensive gesture. In place of the
old standing armies and their “fronts,” he foresaw (and feared) the use of
aerial bombardment of major cities behind enemy lines. For this reason
Scheerbart proposed that the madness of war could be avoided through
the dissolution of old urban centers. In this he follows the anarchist
Peter Kropotkin, who proposed the decentralization of cities. In a more
facetious vein, he proposes confusing the enemy by renaming Paris “New
Berlin” and Berlin “New Paris.”
The quintessence of Scheerbart’s ironic attitude toward technology is
his satirical novel of 1910, Das Perpetuum Mobile, in which he purports
to invent a perpetual motion machine.8 He was as familiar with the laws
of physics as anyone, but the project’s special attraction for him was pre-
cisely his effort to contradict them: “There’s something dilletantish about
always needing to see everything brought to fruition in reality. Ludwig II,
who insisted on sailing around his artificial lake dressed in Lohengrin
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ROSEM A R I E H A AG BLETTER
armor to take full advantage of the Lohengrin ambience, always struck
me as insufferable.”9 His book is a running diary of false starts, assumed