paul scheerbart’s utopia of coloured glass

AIC 2004 Color and Paints, Interim Meeting of the International Color Association, Proceedings

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Paul Scheerbarts utopia of coloured glass

Gertrud OLSSON School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Points of departure for my presentation of Paul Scheerbart and his architecture of coloured glass are the concepts of utopia and transparency. In regard of the theme of the meeting, Colour and Paints, one might reflect on whether transparency contains either colour or paint, or both of them.

The German poet Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was also a visionary architectural writer and inventor engaged in avant-garde circles. For more than twenty years he wrote about his speciality: glass architecture.

His book Glasarchitektur was published in Berlin in 1914. The book a minimalistic essay, a utopian text consists of 111 very short chapters, or rather pieces composed around a single theme, aesthetically elaborated and mirroring Scheerbarts ideological and technical interest in coloured glass. He writes in the first chapter:

We live for the most part within enclosed spaces. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is in a sense a product of our architecture. If we wish to raise our culture to a higher level, we are forced for better or for worse to transform our architecture. And this will be possible only if we remove the enclosed quality from the spaces within which we live. This can be done only through the introduction of glass architecture that lets the sunlight and the light of the moon and stars into our rooms not merely through a few windows, but simultaneously through the greatest possible number of walls that are made entirely of glass coloured glass. The new environment that we shall thereby create must bring with it a new culture. (Scheerbart 1914 [2000: 13])

Scheerbarts aim is to make civilization better, to reform mankind in a new built society.

And the newborn, the future coming is an extensive and far-reaching translucency. New construction technology connected with the decades metaphysical interest and spiritual movements will grow to be the creative forces. This is the utopia of Paul Scheerbart.

Accordingly, his project is composed of the spiritual construction of buildings, of building up in glass materials. Not, however, in transparent glass, but in coloured glass, showering of sparks. Glass as a building material is for Scheerbart infinitely generous, a new material in possession of everything. Glass in common with light owns the possibilities. It does not moulder away.

Scheerbart writes in a pure plain even style as the actual glass. He has a good sense of humour in his texts but is serious in his project. In chapter XIII in Glasarchitektur he writes: Perhaps the honoured reader apprehends that glass architecture is a bit cold. But during the warm season the cold is quite agreeable. At all events, I venture to say that the colours in the glass have a glowing effect, perhaps a new warmth streams out (Scheerbart 1914 [2000: 26]).

Scheerbarts glass house consists of coloured glass elements. The daylight passes and filters the colours, and originates a translucent but not distinctly transparent impression. From the inside you can discern the outside. From the outside you can get an inkling of forms taking shape. Man is not shut in by bricks. The coloured glass shuts her off from peoples view. The coloured glass also presents intimacy in the room. The city and the scenery are barely discernible. On the other hand man is left in peace thinking of the new civilization.


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In the summer of 1913 the architect Bruno Taut (1880-1938) met Scheerbart in a workshop for glass painting and mosaic. They became soul mates and the next summer they collaborated on the Glass House at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition. Taut made the design and construction, and the ideas and visions of Scheerbart soared over the building project. The dream became a reality, the Glass House was realized. Scheerbart contributed maxims and verses on glass and colour to be engraved on the faade: COLOURED GLASS DESTROYS HATRED, WITHOUT A GLASS PALACE LIFE IS A BURDEN (Figure 1).

In conformity with the cathedral builders of the Gothic era Taut is creating an interior separated from the outer world. The interior space is filled with light and colour. The purpose of the Glass House is beauty. The interplay of mosaic, coloured glass, basin-water, reflex and light fills up the building. The house uncovers the architectural potential concealed in the glass material. The cupola embraces a colour-spectrum ranging from deep-blue and moss-green to golden yellow, and, at the very top, the subsiding hue of white gold. The floor is made of glass with an open circle through which the visitors can look downwards, and also walk downstairs, into a lower room of ornaments. The middle of the lower room contains a basin, and from the basin water is streaming towards the exit. In the background of the room is a kaleidoscope, and changing patterns of coloured glass are seen. And in additional to all this: the reflections playing in the water (Figure 2).

The architects began to build of glass. Hygienics argued for interiors filled with sunshine

and light. Medical findings showed a relation between architectural design and the spreading of infectious diseases. Industrial achievements gave chances to model huge glass surfaces. In 1911 Walter Gropius factory, Fagus Werke, was built outside Hannover in glass and steel. Further on the architect developed an engineering in order to give the construction an expression of weightlessness. By displacing the force of gravity away from the faade it became possible to construct the whole faade as a glass surface. The Werkbund exhibition 1914 displayed Gropius curtain-wall, fabricated of clear, transparent glass.

The glass architecture of this kind is different from the architectural ideal of Paul Scheerbart. As we have seen, Scheerbart does not count on transparency. Scheerbart, as well as Taut, looked upon glass as a material with special properties. Glass is, in Tauts words, the floating, the slender, the angular, the sparkling, the light. Nevertheless, glass was not immaterial to Scheerbart and Taut. Glass was the most airy of all materials, but still a material. Even so, one could shape glass into crystals, the highest symbols of purity and death.

Figure 1. Scheerbarts and Tauts Glass House.

Figure 2. The interior of the Glass House.


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Perhaps this is the appropriate place for mentioning that recently I made a visit to a couple of Oscar Niemeyers buildings in Rio de Janeiro. The great Brazilian architect uses the glass brick wall in a rather similar way as Taut does, both in the Ministry of Education and Health and, even more remarkably, in the Headquarters of the Bonavista Bank. In the Bonavista building one can study the translucent effect of a glass brick wall, shaped like a wave, dividing the inside and the outside.

Bruno Tauts belief in the future takes along a social thought involving a decent home for everyone, symbolically to find ones way home. His ambition was a new society socially organized. Architecture will thus become the creator of new social forms, he wrote (Taut 1919). Taut was a forerunner talking of colour in architecture. And he was a forerunner using colour in architecture. As mentioned, Taut was inspired by Gothic architecture, just as Scheerbart was. The cathedral, in the capacity of a module of great and spiritual value, incarnates the building up, in spirit of community, of the new society. A culture for the future was conjured up in which architecture die Urkunst, the Primary Art manifests the idea in common, the social thought. In Tauts utopia Architecture replaces the Christianity of the Gothic era. Taut draws and describes small star-shaped communities spread out over the country. In these communities the cathedrals of the new era glitter in the shape of modern crystal palaces.

Tauts intention was to build a society open to peoples view, to give the citizens the opportunity to obtain a clear insight into their own community. In his capacity, after the Great War, as city architect in the German town Magdeburg, Taut introduced strong colours in the faades, but he did not particularly work in glass. In a project called Das Bunte Magdeburg, Taut invited artists and private house owners to repaint the city. Not only buildings but also kiosks, clocks and advertisements were designed in expressionist colours (Figure 3). During his time in Magdeburg he pursued Siedlung Reform, a municipal housing area in Berlin, in a style so pure and plain that it offended the inhabitants. Furthermore, the colouring was so undisciplined that it distracted the eyes (Konstakademien 1982: 3).

At this time (the 1920s) the Hungarian artist Lszl Moholy-Nagy taught at the Bauhaus-school in Dessau. He examined the tension and relation between light and movement, between materiality and visuality. He studied virtuality and the virtual volume. For example, Moholy-Nagy pointed out that a lighted merry-go-round revolving is virtual but also a visible volume in motion (Figure 4). His constructions of transparent materials such as wire-netting, strainers, plexiglas, grinded panes of glass, light projections and reflecting substances transferred the notions of tangible and non-material forms.

Figure 3. Das Bunte Magdeburg The colourful Magdeburg.

Figure 4. From Moholy-Nagys teaching: a lighted merry-go-round

revolving.


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Moholy-Nagy also introduced the word transparency in architectural context. In architecture transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations (Rowe and Slutsky 1997: 23). We have already touched upon the concept of literal transparency, namely what is described in recent theoretical works, as pervious to light, allowing one to see into or through a building, this was made possible by the development of frame construction and techniques for fixing large areas of glass (Forty 2000: 286). In Words and buildings. A vocabulary of modern architecture, Forty distinguishes between literal, phenomenal and transparency of meaning. In his book The new vision, Moholy-Nagy gives a clear description of transparency in modern architecture:

A white house with great glass windows surrounded by trees becomes almost transparent when the sun shines. The white walls act as projection screens on which shadows multiply the trees, and the glass plates become mirrors in which the trees are repeated. A perfect transparency is the result; the house becomes a part of nature. (Moholy-Nagy 1947: 63-64) In Von Material zu Architektur, a book published in 1929, Moholy-Nagy explicates how a

new world shows itself in the growing visual culture. In painting coloured pigment is replaced by a display of coloured light. And architecture changes from restricted closed spaces into free fluctuation of forces. This alteration is especially manifested by Le Corbusier, in his strive to visually bring the scenery into the room.

Paul Scheerbart, on his part, perceived the different aspects of light, and above all, light refraction so to say powered by glass material. Scheerbart advocated translucency by means of colour, allowing light to pass through areas of glass, though not to the degree of transparency. As we have seen, this opaqueness, this opacity, gives shelter from being observed. Instead it opens up towards the scenery outside and it makes room for peace and contemplation.

Built in glass, iron and concrete Scheerbarts glass architecture is transparent in the literal sense of the word. The erected Glass House is in possession of a transparency of meaning experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself (Sontag 1996: 13). But Paul Scheerbarts notion of transparency is also metaphorical, as a utopia of a new society. The metaphor indicates something different from the literal meaning, a change of use.

Perhaps is Scheerbarts utopia a challenge to our contemporary views. A challenge to our modern world built in a way (and I am now using a sentence taken from Moholy-Nagys The new vision, 1947: 62) where it is no longer possible to keep apart the inside and outside.

REFERENCES Forty, A. 2000. Words and buildings. A vocabulary of modern architecture. London: Thames &

Hudson. Konstakademien. 1982. Fyra engagerade i Berlin. Bruno Taut. Stockholm: Kungl. akademien fr de

fria konsterna. Moholy-Nagy, L. 1947. The new vision, 4th ed., and Abstract of an artist. New York: G. Wittenborn. . 1929. Von Material zu Architektur. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2001. Rowe, C., and R. Slutsky. 1997. Transparency. Basel: Birkhuser. Scheerbart, P. 1914. Glasarchitektur. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2000. Sontag, S. 1996. Against interpretation and other essays. New York: Picador. Taut, B. 1919. Die Stadtkrone. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2002.

Address: Gertrud Olsson, School of Architecture Royal Institute of Technology KTH, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden

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paul scheerbart’s utopia of coloured glass

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