Paul Scheerbart and the Utopia of Glass (original) (raw)

People who Live in Glass Houses: Walter Benjamin and the Dream of Glass Architecture

The glass house began with descriptions of a utopian ideal just after World War I when Walter Benjamin and others discussed the use of glass to create an appropriate domestic environment for living in the modern world. Glass was perceived to have qualities that rendered it perfect for the construction of the modern house; with glass walls even signifying the modern. Their words and work influenced the mid-century Modern houses of Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. They in turn are again highly influential in the twenty-first century, particularly in New Zealand, where the glass pavilion house has become an established feature in the architectural press. This paper argues that such extensive use of glass subverts the modernity it aspires to, by discussing Walter Benjamin’s writings on glass, particularly in his essay ‘Experience and Poverty’, and drawing on recent work by Hilde Heynen on domesticity. Whilst glass has indeed ushered in the modern world, it also has aspects that disconnect it from the modern.

The Glass Room: Housing space, time and history

CrossRoads, 2022

This article presents The Glass Room (2009), a novel by the British author Simon Mawer set in Brno, the Czech Republic, as a unique literary portrayal of a historical period and Modernist architecture in fiction. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the novel marked a turning point in its author's career, inspiring both theatrical and film adaptations, and, perhaps more importantly, it sparked a resurgence of interest in its model, the famous Tugendhat House, a revolutionary piece of Modernist architecture built between 1928 and 1930 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The narration of the novel is determined by the centrality of both the Landauer House and its main living space, the Glass Room, and their capacity to frame the intimate histories of the characters as well as the tumultuous social, political, and cultural developments of Central Europe. The spatial poetics of The Glass Room reflects this thematic complexity, whilst expressing the key aesthetic and ethical preoccupations of Modernist architecture and contributing to the novel's role in providing a multifaceted insight into history and architecture.