by Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!-A Paul Scheerbart Reader Josiah McElheny
3. Colored glass
Destroys al hatred at last.
Das bunte Glas / Zerstört den Haß.
4. Joy through color
Is the realm of glass culture.
Farbenglück nur / In der Glaskultur.
5. Without a palace of glass
Life is a burdensome task.
Ohne einen Glaspalast / Ist das Leben eine Last.
6. A glass house won’t go up in smoke
Even if the extinguisher’s broke.
Im Glashaus brennt es nimmermehr; / Man braucht da keine Feuerwehr.
7. There is no vermin so smal
That can invade a glass house at al .
Das Ungeziefer ist nicht fein; / Ins Glashaus kommt es niemals rein.
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BRUNO TAUT A N D PAUL S C H E E R B A R T
8. Materials flammable
Are an absolute scandal.
Brennbare Materialia / Sind wirkliche Skandalia.
9. Grander than a Diamond
Is a house with double-glazed wal s.
Größer als der Diamant / Ist die doppelte Glashauswand.
10. Light passes through the universe
And comes to life in crystal.
Das Licht wil durch das ganze Al / Und ist lebendig im Kristal .
11. The prism is bril iant;
It makes glass magnificent.
Das Prisma ist doch groß; / Drum ist das Glas famos.
12. If from color you do flee,
Nothing of the universe wil you see.
Wer die Farbe flieht, / Nichts vom Weltal sieht.
13. Glass makes everything bright,
Build with it on this very site.
Das Glas Bringt al es Hel e, / Verbau es auf der Stel e.
14. Glass heralds a new tomorrow;
The culture of brick brings only sorrow.
Das Glas bringt uns die neue Zeit; / Backsteinkultur tut uns nur leid.
15. Bal oons may be light,
But ferroconcrete’s right.
Preise nicht mehr den Luftbal on, / Preise doch mal den Eisenbeton!
16. What would construction become
Without ferroconcrete?
Was wäre die Konstruktion / Ohne den Eisenbeton?
• • •
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G L A S S HOUSE L E T T E R S
Berlin-Lichterfelde 4, Marschnerstraße 15
12 February 1914
Dear . . . !
You never believed that I too could be in a bad mood sometimes. Thank
you very much for the orchids. I’m gradual y feeling a little better. But — I
stil can’t read your manuscript today. Soon — I hope.
Many beautiful greetings from my house to yours. And I am your
old
Paul Scheerbart.
• • •
Berlin-Lichterfelde 4, Marschnerstraße 15
13 February 1914
Dear . . . !
Thanks for your friendly let er. But I can’t seem to get anywhere with
the circular motto. It’s impossible. They al seem forced, and that won’t do.
10, 12, 9, and 1 seem like a good selection. I’d be very happy if you stick
with these. As long as the letters are real y clear. At the moment I’m nego-
tiating with three publishers. I hope that in fourteen days or three weeks,
Glass Architecture wil be a “done deal,” “Done deal,” that’s good, isn’t it?
Double Glass House greetings!
Your old
Paul Scheerbart.
• • •
Berlin-Lichterfelde 4, Marschnerstraße 15
13 February 1914
Dear . . . !
This week has seen so many developments and I’ve gotten so many
assignments, I’m nearly crushed under al the correspondence. I’m sup-
posed to write about your Glass House for the Technische Monatshefte,
Stuttgart;6 I’ve already agreed to write about the model. When wil it be
here? I’m writing from il ustrations (photographs), perhaps stereotype
prints. Could you perhaps lend it to me?
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G L A S S HOUSE L E T T E R S
I’d be very grateful for your prompt reply. And for your thoughts on
the mottoes.
With big spring greetings from my house to yours I am
Your old
Paul Scheerbart.
Wait! There’s something in the T. M. about glass that doesn’t break. Have
you heard about it? By the way, I’m also supposed to write about glass
architecture in general for the T. M.
• • •
Berlin-Lichterfelde 4, Marschnerstraße 15
17 February 1914
Dear . . . !
First, congratulations! Long live the Kladow Prize. I also like the
area very much. And that’s why it has to be completely rebuilt. One can’t
rebuild enough.7
Second, condolences! (for the models of the Glass House poorly packed
in Cologne and as a result broken). Those damned Colognians*— they’re
giving me a stomachache too. I can wel understand your anger. You should
have insured the thing. Yes — in this earthly life one cannot be too careful.
Please pardon my trite wisdom. But it’s ten in the morning and I’m
almost in a good mood. I guess so, anyway.
I’m real y looking forward to going to W. with you someday. But I want
to write the article right away, so I would be very grateful if you’l send the
photographs.
I composed lines al day yesterday for the lord of ferroconcrete. Final y
I came up with this:
Bal oons may be light
But ferroconcrete’s right!
Preise nicht mehr den Luftbal on,
Preise doch mal den Eisenbeton!
*They’re local patriots! Cologne should be renamed New-Berlin.
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BRUNO TAUT A N D PAUL S C H E E R B A R T
If you and the lord of ferroconcrete like it, I’l be very glad. I do know,
by the way, that “Beton” [concrete] isn’t meant to be pronounced nasal y.
But the nasal pronunciation is already commonplace. These verses took me
a lot of work. I’m already doubting myself. And if the “Glass Palace” gets
into it, I’l be very happy.
Now, don’t forget the photographs.
And — long live the Maecenas of the Rhein!
I am whol y your
Paul Scheerbart.
• • •
Berlin-Lichterfelde 4, Marschnerstraße 15
18 February 1914
Dear . . . !
Thank you very much for both of the photographs; they’re already on
their way to the Technische Monatshefte in Stuttgart with the article. I’ve
also promised to send the drawings by Herr W. Surely you’l be good
enough to let me know when you hope to be in possession of the drawings.
Glass House greetings! And I am your old
Paul Scheerbart.
• • •
Berlin-Lichterfelde 4, Marschnerstraße 15
20 February 1914
Dear . . . !
Thank you very much for your card. Stressing* “ferroconcrete” also
strikes me as bet er. How do you like:
What would construction become
Without ferroconcrete?
Was wäre die Konstruktion / Ohne den Eisenbeton?8
*Sorry! A distressing pun!
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BRUNO TAUT A N D PAUL S C H E E R B A R T
I’d be delighted if that works, but I’l not kid myself— I don’t think any-
thing real y good can come of it. That’s why I wanted to put in the balloon,
which actual y has nothing t
o do with it.9
Hearty greetings
Your
Glass Papa
• • •
Berlin-Lichterfelde 4, Marschnerstraße 15
11 March 1914
Dear . . . !
Thank you for your kind let er. We’l be at your office tomorrow, Thurs-
day, so long as nothing pressing interferes (my health is a bit shaky), around
half past five.
Then we can just talk. Glass Architecture is final y almost home.
With many greetings from us both I am your old
Paul Scheerbart.
The Technische Monatshefte in Stuttgart is taking the T. article and would
also like Glass Architecture.10
Mül er’s Ladies’ Novel wil come out in 3 or 4 weeks.11
Translated by Anne Posten and Laura Lindgren
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G L A S S HOUSE L E T T E R S
NOTES
1. This statement about Scheerbart, presumably by Taut, opens the section of the
magazine where the letters appear.
2. “Fairy hair” or “glass hair” is discussed by Scheerbart at length in his essay “Glass
Houses: Bruno Taut’s Glass Palace at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition” published in
Technische Monatshefte: Technik für Alle (this book, page 96). “Glass hair” is drawn
glass fiber, similar in some ways to fiberglass, which Scheerbart imagines will be useful
throughout the house, woven into everything from carpets to curtains.
3. This book, Scheerbart, “Glass Houses,” 96.
4. Mottoes by Paul Scheerbart were inscribed around the base of the dome of Taut’s Glass
House at the Cologne Werkbund. See illustrations, this book, 108–9, 115.
5. The original rhyming German mottoes appear beneath each translation. Six
mottoes — 1, 3, 10, 13, and 14 — and a motto about concrete that Scheerbart sent to
Taut ten days later (see note 9) were finally chosen for inscription.
6. This book, Scheerbart, “Glass Houses,” 96.
7. Scheerbart is referring to a design competition for the Kladow district in Berlin.
8. This motto was one of the six chosen to be inscribed on the Glass House.
9. Scheerbart’s humorously rhyming couplet celebrates the use of steel-reinforced
concrete (ferroconcrete) in the Glass House. Although known as an example of the
innovative uses of glass, the Glass House was also a demonstration of new concrete
technologies.
10. This book, Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, 22–90. Despite Scheerbart’s reaching out
to Technische Monatshefte and other publishers, Glass Architecture was in the end
published by Verlag der Sturm, Berlin, soon after these letters were written.
11. Paul Scheerbart, The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White: A Ladies Novel (Munich and
Berlin: Georg Müller, 1914). Both of Scheerbart’s major “glass” novels were published
in time for the May opening of the Werkbund; The Gray Cloth in April, and Glass
Architecture in late May 1914. With Scheerbart’s mottoes inscribed on the building
and included in the brochure, one can surmise that both books were discussed by at
least some of the visitors to the Werkbund upon completion of Taut’s Glass House in
July 1914.
143
Hollyamber Kennedy
Untimely Meditations and
Other Modernisms:
On the Glass-Dream Visions
of Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart
In 1920 the German architect and editor Bruno Taut dedicated the third
issue of Frühlicht to his friend and collaborator Paul Scheerbart.1 “Let
anyone who who doesn’t already know be told that in 50 years he will
be a German classic,” Taut wrote, praising him as “the only poet of
architecture . . . who died ‘of the war’ on October 15, 1915, age 52.”2 The
entire issue, in fact, was given over to the poet, whom Taut venerated
as prophetlike, a weeping philosopher of dynamic change and cosmic
flux. In Scheerbart Taut discovered a modern Heraclitus whose world
was engendered and devoured by glass. In memory of the vital role that
Scheerbart’s ideas had played in his life, Taut reprinted in Frühlicht ten
letters Scheerbart sent to him from December 1913 to March 1914. These
“Glass House Letters,” as Taut called them, chart, in the playful and pas-
sionately messianic voice of Scheerbart, the construction of their shared
glass-dream modernism.
Scheerbart — Taut’s self-professed Glaspapa — cultivated a life of para-
dox, like the curious astral characters of his novels. His peculiar anarchist
humor — trained on the cosmos and its perpetual motion — and his belief
in the generative power of the unfamiliar gave cause to his embrace of the
decentralized text, body, and image, and gave rise to a new generation
of architectural thought and experiment, most poignantly embodied in
Die Baumaterialien der Zukunft (The building materials of the future) by Paul Scheerbart,
1893. Front cover of a prospectus. Other than this incomplete example in a private collection,
no other copies of this prospectus or of a related book or manuscript have been located. The
contents page lists twenty-four chapters of the planned book, but the summaries of the second
half of the list are missing. The proposed book would have presented, in 1893, some of the same
revolutionary ideas that were to be outlined in Glass Architecture more than twenty years later.
145
HOLLYA MBER K E N N E D Y
the early work of his close friend, anarchist ally, and collaborator Bruno
Taut. Scheerbart’s spectral, hallucinatory stories speak of the transcendent
release of estrangement, as extraordinary and relevant today, in their
Nietzschean “untimeliness,” as they were a century ago. With a clarity of
vision empowered by revolt, Scheerbart crafted images, all prismatic and
refracting, of another world, different from ours by minor degrees, yet
full of miraculous curiosities: genderless bodies, floating concrete towns,
ships made of glass, nights so bright with electricity they become the day.
Perhaps nowhere is Scheerbart’s desire for a synthetic transformation
of the ecology of life more legible than in his novel Glass Architecture,
published in 1914 — a fantastically strange manifesto of a novel whose
principal concepts were outlined by the author nearly twenty years ear-
lier, in his 1893 prospectus titled The Building Materials of the Future,
a remarkable document whose remaining fragments have only recently
come to light.3 In his prospectus Scheerbart described the architecture
of the future in the language of dictums. The new regime of building,
he wrote, will bring an end to the “tyranny of right angles” and to the
tectonic constraints of brick, stone, and wood. “Free lines, complicated
curves, and color” will define new modes of dwelling among “domes and
balconies, hanging stairs and high towers.”4 Windows will become walls
of glass — this in 1893!
In an article published in Die Glocke in 1921, Taut returned to the
theme of the “untimely” modernity of Scheerbart’s glass imaginaries:
“What beckons us, and what Scheerbart anticipated . . . is actual construc-
tion with glass — an uncomfortable prospect that ‘we’ will nonetheless
make into a comfortable reality. . .
. It is with this idea that the history
of glass architecture begins.”5 The Gothic masters, like modernist prim-
itives, “stretched light between grids of stone” — the great prelude to
the “full reality of glass architecture” born in Scheerbart’s work.6 Both
his prospectus and the novel that followed, written on the eve of the
Great War, whose technological horrors Scheerbart foresaw, unfold like
prophecies of a new technical age, a cosmic era guided by the humanizing
properties of a cosmopolitan glass culture. In the reconfigured landscapes
of Scheerbart’s texts, architectural boundaries vanish as we are expelled
from our quotidian lives, our linear geometries, and our brick houses; we
Die Baumaterialien der Zukunft (The building materials of the future) by Paul Scheerbart,
1893, chapter list (see translation on page 148). Note the evocative titles, prefiguring various
themes from Scheerbart’s future oeuvre, specifically Glass Architecture.
146
1. The end of street architecture.
2. The meaning of freestanding houses.
3. The future of gardens.
4. Polychromatism and light in architecture.
5. Iron versus stone.
6. Reinforced glass and mica.
7. Glass bricks.
8. Glass mosaics.
9. Glass painting.
10. Imitation glass.
11. Anthracite.
12. Glass — coated.
13. Lacquer.
14. Majolica.
15. The architect as healer.
16. The architect as artist.
17. Comparative pricing of new building materials.
18. The new building regulations in Berlin’s suburbs.
19. The Parisian World Exposition of 1900 and its City of the Future.
20. The architectural mission of today.
21. Booksel ing markets.
22. Exhibition palaces in Helgoland.
23. Theater palaces in Rugia.
24. The aesthetic treatment of electrical railways.
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U NTIMELY MEDITATIONS A N D OTHER MODERNISMS
are sent back into the garden to begin anew. The profound irony of this
