Glass Architecture/Alpine Architecture (1972)

Paul Scheerbart’s book Glasarchitektur was published in a limited edition in 1914, a year before the author’s death. It is now regarded as a classic text among the historians of the romantically orientated, or Expressionistic, phase of the modern movement in architecture. Scheerbart himself was not an architect, but an Expressionist poet and novelist whose writings were concerned with extra-terrestrial adventures and Utopian fantasies. In this book he outlines his programme for a world of glass and concrete; he envisages a society renewed by a new architecture. He dedicates it to Bruno Taut, a younger Utopian (1880–1936), who in turn dedicates his Glass Pavilion at the 1914 Cologne Werkbund Exhibition to Scheerbart.

Bruno Taut’s own book, Alpine Architektur, was contemplated in 1917 and published in 1919. It was conceived as a ‘hymn of praise to the magnificence of the world’. It is entirely Scheerbartian, and extends Scheerbart’s own principles into graphic reality with projects for surmounting alpine peaks with glass and concrete structures. The glass architecture environments predicted by Scheerbart were to be situated in what were thought to be the ‘safe lands’ of the Swiss Alps.

Dennis Sharp, a leading authority on Expressionist architecture, discusses in his introduction the effect that Scheerbart’s work had on members of the various avant-garde groups in Berlin after World War I.

Condition: dust-wrapper a little marked and lightly yellowed along top edge.