theory
Joseph Paxton and Bruno Taut’s contrasting attitudes to glass
illustrate a wider argument about the fictive quality of materials
in the making of architecture.
The fictive quality of glass
Ufuk Ersoy
‘The fire is burning. Is it burning for me or against me? Will
it give tangible shape to my dreams, or will it eat them up? I
know pottery traditions going back thousands of years; all
the potters’ tricks I know, I have used them all. But we have
not yet reached the end. The spirit of the material has not yet
been overcome.’
(Adolf Loos, ‘Pottery’)1
These were the words of a potter sitting in front of
his kiln. ‘May it never be! May the secrets of the
material always remain mysterious to us,’
commented Adolf Loos on the thoughts of the
artisan.2 ‘Otherwise,’ he speculated, the ‘potter
would not be sitting in happy torment at his kiln,
waiting, hoping, dreaming of new colours and clays,
which God in his wisdom forgot to create, in order to
allow mankind to participate in the glorious joy of
creation.’3 For Loos, the spirit of the materials could
1 2
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be conquered neither at the drawing board nor in
the workshop, regardless of the ‘imprecision of
chance, passion, dreams, and the mystery of
creation’.4
However, historical accounts all too often conclude
that the technological breakthrough of glass
production by the second half of the nineteenth
century released the inherent character of the
material, notably its transparency.5 All of the
literature written in this pragmatic framework of
industrial progress, in general, postulates the
scientific advance in manufacturing techniques not
as a milestone in the history of glass making but as
the ultimate point in the invention of glass as a
building material. The priority of transparent glass
in this discourse narrows the boundaries of the
dialogue between the material and architects in a
restricted frame of reference.6 In addition to this
semantic restriction, the burial of the material’s past
in oblivion manipulates its status in cultural
memory. The substance that had been recognised as
the philosopher’s stone in the hands of the alchemist
was transformed into an industrial commodity
bound by the logic and rules of technology.
Seemingly, the redefinition of glass as an industrial
artifact without any precedent reframed it as an
emblem of modern technology in its most advanced
form. Problematically, in the twentieth-century
vision of architecture, which oscillates between
instrumental and communicative modes of
understanding, the association of glass with
1 The Crystal Palace
2 The Glashaus,
Deutsche Form im
Kriegsjahr, die
Ausstellung Köln 1914,
Jahrbuch des
Deutschen
Werkbundes 1915
(Munich: F.
Bruckmann A. G.,
1915), p. 77
theory arq . vol 11 . no 3/4 . 2007 237
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238 arq . vol 11 . no 3/4 . 2007 theory
industrialisation automatically chained it to one side
of the polarity between technology and
representation.
Rekindling the memories of two seminal buildings
that have been frequently referred to as paradigms
for the use of glass in architecture – the Crystal
Palace (1851) by Joseph Paxton and the Glashaus
(1914) by Bruno Taut [1, 2] – contrary to the
entrenched historicist view, this essay aims to reveal
that Paxton and Taut did not value glass as a
corollary of industrialisation; rather, the substance
appealed to them by virtue of its fictive attributes.
The potential of glass to act in the subjunctive mode
of as if and to mask reality offered Paxton and Taut a
different way of engaging with the environment.
Intrigued by its paradoxical character – glass being
the most incorporeal material that urges sensual
limits – Paxton and Taut attempted to use glass as a
substitute for traditional stone as they pursued
alternate connections between people and nature.
Despite their common point of departure, their
spatial configurations and handling of the substance
differed radically and even conflicted.
In a broad perspective, given the fact that the
Crystal Palace and the Glashaus were both designed
for historically significant exhibitions that
instigated debates on industrialisation, they appear
to be two of several consecutive steps in the same line
of thought. In Modern Architecture, published in 1929,
however, Taut drew a delicate line that distinguished
his major concern for architectonic quality from the
‘mathematical reasoning’ of Paxton and engineers.
Although he placed the Crystal Palace in the same
chapter with his own Glashaus among examples that
deserved to be called forerunners of modern building,
surprisingly he simultaneously called attention to a
shift of orientation in the architectural discourse
prompted by the forceful art critic John Ruskin, who
had declared his aversion to the Crystal Palace and
had never set foot in it.7
Countering the utilitarian circle of the time,
which included Paxton, Ruskin rigorously advocated
‘useless’ architecture.8 His polemical statement on
the useless aspects of buildings was a call for a turn
from a knowledge-based outlook for construction
procedures toward a ‘virtue’ of architecture that
Ruskin reserved for creativity. For Ruskin, just as
good architecture should ‘act’ well in the sense of
sheltering one ‘from weather or violence’, it should
equally ‘talk’ well, as it was the ‘practical duty’ of
‘churches, temples, public edifices treated as books
[…]’.9 Ruskin verbosely accentuated talking as the
foremost virtue of architecture, yet he believed that
this was a complicated subject that could not be
governed by rules or pursued systematically as
technē, or art. Basically, architects need to be aware of
two methods of expression, ‘some conventional’ and
‘some natural’.10 However, Ruskin was certain about
the helplessness of transparent, colourless glass. A
surface that made ‘the lights transparent and the
shadows opaque’ could not lay claim to the role of
natural stone, the orthodox medium of expression
in architecture.11 Glass should be recessed from the
surface [3].
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3
3 The Oxford Museum,
the sculptor O’Shea
at work, The Works of
John Ruskin (New York:
G. Allen; Longmans,
Green, and co., 1905),
v. 16, p. 228
To understand the distinction Taut set up with
reference to Ruskin, one must question how these
two buildings talked and how glass contributed to
this conversation. This hinges on the fundamental
premise that was upheld by Paul Ricoeur. Similar to
written speech, architecture is a sort of fiction that
externalises human thoughts through a material
medium. 12 The premise generates a basic question:
what could be the impulse behind the choice of glass
as a material medium? To answer this question,
although the premise diverges from Plato, who
renounced the ability of any material medium to
represent ideas, to refer to a famous episode in which
Socrates discussed the art of speech making with an
admirer of rhetoric, his friend Phaedrus may be
convenient. For Plato, as long as rhetoric was a ‘way
of directing the soul by means of speech’, the crucial
issue of which orators should be aware was the
nature of the soul that they addressed.13 This
knowledge enabled orators to find an appropriate
and plausible kind of speech and to partially
anticipate its effects. Accordingly, it is essential to
assess the kind of speech that Paxton and Taut
presented through their buildings, in view of the
soul of whom they sought to address. Equally
importantly, a glance at the metaphors that Paxton
and Taut used to decipher the image of architecture
that encouraged them to use glass supports this
assessment. In brief, this essay attempts to identify
the occupant that they imagined and observe the
metaphors on which they drew to reconcile
industrialised glass with representational principles
of architecture.
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 theory arq . vol 11 . no 3/4 . 2007 239

Tablecloth
After the construction of the Crystal Palace, Paxton
proudly affirmed that the well-known sketch that he
draughted on a piece of blotting paper during a
railway board meeting showed truthfully how he had
predicted ‘the principal features of the building as it
[would stand]’14 [4, 5]. Drafting the cross-section on
top, he envisaged the structural layout and its
proportions; the elevation below, showing arched
glass bays crowned by a frilly parapet, represented the
layer that he used to cover the structure. To describe
the role of this covering layer, Paxton later compared
it to ‘a tablecloth’.15 Although Paxton handled the
tablecloth as a metaphor to explain the correlation
between the two components of the construction, it
might have had a far-reaching implication in
architecture because it hints at Paxton’s affiliation
with the occupant of the building.
Diagrammatically, Paxton compared the iron
framework with a four-legged table. The cover, made
of wood and glass, would dress this quadrupedal
body, like a pliable drape that does not carry any
formal pattern in itself. Likewise, akin to a cloth
protecting the surface of the table, wooden sash bars
with glass infill panels composed an impermeable
layer resistant to weather conditions, which would
prevent the corrosion of fragile iron components. In 4
fact, the glass cloth was not essentially built to
protect the iron structure; rather, Paxton conceived
the structure as a schematic replica of the original
guest at the table. He admitted that the idea of a large
glass house came out of his gardening experience,
particularly from the greenhouse that he built for
his Amazonian water lily, Victoria Regia16 [6]. The
Victoria Regia’s leaf offered Paxton a reasonable
example of ‘natural engineering’. Its schematic
diagram proved to him that the ridge and furrow
5
roofing system that he had inherited from John
Claudius Loudon could easily carry itself and be
cantilevered with only the support of a few
crossbeams. The lily house was the structural concept
through which the Crystal Palace took shape.
Away from its possible emotive evocations, the
tablecloth was an analogical model that provided
Paxton with grounds to confirm and describe the
structural system on which he was working. However,
if the lily house is considered allegorically on the
basis of its horticultural function, the image of the 6
tablecloth can also serve to specifically decode the
fictive role of glass in Paxton’s eyes. Through this 4 Paxton’s sketch 6 Paxton’s drawing
of the lily house,
metaphor, Paxton, probably unwittingly, brought 5 Side view J. Paxton, ‘The Industrial
together an unchanging furnishing element of the Palace in Hyde Park’,
domestic interior, the table, with an overseas guest The Illustrated London
News, 16 November
coming from a mysterious, unknown world. Similar 1850, p. 385
to a table set for a guest, the primary task of the lily
house was to provide space for the nurture of Victoria
Regia and introduce her to the household. As, in the Architecture, in which he argued that the art of
usual course of events, a tablecloth contributes to the building began with the use of textiles. On the
festive character of the dining room by representing surface, Semper’s principle of dressing – Bekleidung –
the table in terms of hospitality and care, the glass might seem to sustain Paxton’s metaphor. At the core
cloth’s primary purpose was to rescue the plant from of Semper’s theory was his basic presumption that
estrangement and to bring intimacy. the origin of monumental architecture could be
The same year that Paxton built the Crystal Palace, traced to commemorative drama.17 Similar to the
Gottfried Semper completed his Four Elements of mimetic act of masking that enabled actors to

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240 arq . vol 11 . no 3/4 . 2007 theory
represent different characters, the dressing of
buildings corresponded to the ‘annihilation of
reality’ necessary to make symbolic content appear.
Parallel to Semper’s theory, in the lily house, the
wood and glass covering came before the structure in
charge of load-bearing. Furthermore, Paxton
preferred the impermeable transparent surface,
which admitted sunlight and kept in heat,
specifically for its denial of existing climatic
conditions. Nevertheless, while for Semper the
annihilation of reality implied a creative
transformation of the surface from matter to form,
transparent glass visually denied the presence of the
wall [7]. Therefore, although it enabled the watering
and heating systems in the greenhouse to mimic a
tropical climate, the transparent glass could achieve
such a representational role only for a body without
eyes, such as the Victoria Regia. To be more precise,
the artificial climate in the lily house was an
invisible mask on the face of the Victoria Regia that
made her behave intimately, as if she were at home.
Paxton’s passionate relationship with the
Amazonian water lily developed in two stages.
During the first phase, which might be called
acquaintance, the Victoria Regia directed the gestures
of Paxton, who tried to decipher her behaviour. After
learning about the needs and demands of the plant
through an empirical process of trial and error,
Paxton became able to prescribe and regulate her
growth. The lily house was the discrete enclosure
that rendered the plant’s life and the interior
amenable to observation and precise measurement.
In short, through glass, Paxton devised a diaphragm
that neutralised the interaction between interior
and exterior and enabled him to treat most
environmental factors, except light, as measurable
variables. The controlled and rearranged interior
persuaded Victoria Regia and displayed Paxton’s
capacity to manipulate the laws of nature. Charles
Dickens praised Paxton’s dexterity with the following
words: ‘He coaxed the flower into bloom by
manufacturing a Berbician climate in a tiny South
America, under a glass case’; this could be achieved
only by a savant whose alma mater was Nature.18
7 Tomb of Midas sketch Aesthetik. 2 vols.
by Semper. Der Stil in (Frankfurt: Verlag
den technischen und für Kunst und
tektonischen Künsten, Wissenschaft, 1860),
oder praktische v. 1, p. 401
7 Art’ and associated it with the architectonic quality
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Crystal
What attracted the attention of Taut, like many
painters, to the Crystal Palace was the aspect of the
building of which Paxton had the least control: the
effects of sunlight and atmospheric changes on the
glass surface. Taut’s only available watercolour
sketch of the Glashaus reflected his sensitivity to light
[8, 9]. Unlike Paxton, Taut made this sketch after the
building’s construction had been completed. In it,
the white brush line that frames Taut’s introspective
view represents the thick, double-skin, glass wall
composed of a thin transparent layer and coloured
Luxfer prisms. The coloured glass cupola encircling
the room refracts the sunlight, which remains
homogenous and unvoiced outside the building and
makes it readable in shades of yellow, red, and white.
The interplay of light and coloured glass inscribes
the covering surface with bright and sparkling hues.
Taut’s creation of this afterthought sketch clearly
shows that his coloured glass walls had something
more to tell than Taut knew and had anticipated. He
engaged with the building to see what he had not
foreseen and experienced what glass revealed to the
eyes and body of a visitor.
The pamphlet that Taut prepared for the visitors of
the Glashaus exclusively declared that ‘[the building]
has no other purpose than to be beautiful’.19 This
phrase was the sign of a quest for an architecture
‘free […] from utilitarian claims’.20 Later, in a tone
more reminiscent of Ruskin, Taut explained himself
further, maintaining that the act of doing is not
determined merely by finding a solution to what is
pragmatically necessary and that what is not surplus
is compelled to perish in time. Taut stressed the
impotence of defining architecture merely as a
material fixation of practical demands.21 By surplus,
Taut pointed to the representational faculty of
architecture; buildings carrying more than a single
meaning. However, contra Ruskin, Taut held that
surplus did not refer to an addition or external
figure appended to a building; it entailed a variation
in signification, a deviation from the literal or
materialist meaning of a building. Glass, especially
coloured glass, which can catch and colour the
sunlight, could dematerialise the surface while it
clad the room – Raumumhüllung [10]. The coloured
glass surface not only rendered the interaction
between light and surface perceivable but also made
the luminosity appear differently than that seen in
ordinary vision. In this respect, for Taut, glass, which
transcended ordinary vision, was a complement to
the surplus meaning of architecture. Eagerly, Taut
anticipated that, like a ‘garment of hidden
inscriptions’, coloured glass could activate the
narrative capacity of architecture.22
It is unquestionable that the impulse that
motivated Taut was his belief in the necessity of a
temple of the arts that, like the Gothic Cathedral,
would unite all artists and society [11, 12]. A
contemporary art critic and advocate of Taut’s
architecture, Adolf Behne, defined the ideal of
artistic unity under the leadership of architecture
(Gesamtkunstwerk) as an ‘inner transformation of all
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that he saw in cubism.23 In German discourse, as an

alternative to perspective, cubism offered a different
means of representation: the process of
crystallisation, which could bring into expression
the spiritual laws and cosmic order of the world. By
the turn of the century, in the visual arts, the crystal
was seen as an earthly reflection of geometric
abstract forms and represented creative power giving
shape to dead matter. Under the influence of
Romanticism, Expressionist and Cubist artists
believed that they possessed this spiritual,
transformative force, which let them see and display
‘formative energies in the world’.24

11

10

8 Taut’s sketch 11 Taut’s drawing for 12 Taut’s sketch of

the opening Collegiate Church at
9 Interior view of the programme of the Stuttgart, 1904
glass cupola exhibition, Glashaus:
Werkbundausstellung
10 The crown of the Cöln (Cologne:
glass cupola [n. pub.], 1914) 12

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242 arq . vol 11 . no 3/4 . 2007 theory
As the bohemian poet Paul Scheerbart, whom Taut
called his Glaspapa, depicted in his architectural
fantasies, the expressive medium that could
seamlessly bring to light the spirit of the world,
similarly to crystal, was glass. Similar to religious
legends, in which the glass temple symbolised the
divine gnosis, in Scheerbart’s tales, the dramatic
effect of the built environment animated by
coloured glass brought about a spiritual
transformation on the social scale. A ‘modern
aesthetic culture’ could take the place of lost
‘cultural and religious unity’.25 Like Scheerbart, Taut,
who was already interested in seeing the world in
another hue, explored the simultaneously chthonic
and phantasmal performance of glass. A glass
surface could alter the face of the earth; it could
make the soil act as if it were intangible, like ‘air,
water, fire’, and ‘ice’.26 Taut was convinced that,
because of its sensuousness, coloured glass, which
could modulate space and time at the sensory,
emotional, and aesthetic levels of experience, could
open a door to the opaque, symbolic depth of the
world; it could reactivate a mysterious vision of the
world similar to the one in Homo religiosus’s eyes.
Epideictic speech
Obviously, although Paxton and Taut were both
driven by an enthusiasm to use glass, their interests
in the material were not fed by the same spring. Even
if it is anachronistic, Paxton and Taut’s approaches to
architecture in these two buildings are reminiscent
of the initial episode of Phaedrus, in which Plato
criticises two problematic types of speech. Socrates,
who was always reluctant to step out of the walls of
Athens, decided to leave the city for the sake of
learning about the speech of Lysias, whom Phaedrus
praised for knowing all the tricks of rhetoric.
Walking in the country and searching for a spot to
sit, Socrates convinced Phaedrus to read the speech
loudly. Meanwhile, Socrates realised that he was no
longer the same person he knew in the city. Seduced
by the lyrical beauty of nature, he discovered some
parts of himself that he did not discern before.27 After
hearing Lysias’ speech on the subject of love and
training (pederasty), Socrates condemned the speech
for its exaggerated emphasis on the utilitarian
aspects of love and training and its epideictic quality,
which had no other purpose than to display the
talent of the orator and the impact of his tongue on
his listeners.28 Lysias forgot that the intention of the
speech was to expand their view to bring them closer
to what was good or noble in the subject of which he
was speaking, not to persuade and control the
audience by manipulating their preconceived views
or beliefs.
Astonishingly, in Phaedrus, to emphasise his
concern about the reliability of writing which, at the
time, was about to replace the accepted medium of
communication – speech, Plato talked about the
artificial climate in the gardens of Adonis.29 Here, for
Plato, the attempt to accelerate the growth of a plant
by artificial means and to stimulate it to an early
maturity did not only evoke the epideictic speech of
Lysias, but also exemplified how writing would be
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harmful for ideas ‘suited to the old medium’.30
Socrates asked Phaedrus, ‘Would a sensible farmer,
who cared about his seeds and wanted them to yield
fruit, plant them in all seriousness in the gardens of
Adonis in the middle of the summer and enjoy
watching them bear fruit within seven days?’31 Years
after winning over the Victoria Regia and proving his
talent, Paxton summarised his objective in
horticulture in a utilitarian tone: ‘to enable the
owners of gardens to get the greatest amount of
pleasure and satisfaction from their possessions, and
to enable the general public to procure the greatest
number of fruit, flowers and vegetables in the
greatest quantity, of the best kinds, and at the
cheapest prices’.32 The Crystal Palace was an outcome
of this epideictic speech.
Alternatively, Taut’s work seemed to draw a parallel
to the counter-response of Socrates to Lysias on the
same subject. A point that distinguishes the two
cases is that, unlike Taut, before beginning his
speech, Socrates realised that out of the city, he ‘was
possessed by the gods and spirits that inhabit the
enchanted place’ and what he said could be neither
his nor their words.33 Being out of the city, he learned
some things previously unknown about himself, but
inspired by gods and nymphs, he lost his dignity and
self-control. After making the speech, he felt it
necessary to correct the rhetorically superior, but
still epideictic narrative immediately with an
ethically proper one. On the other hand, for
enthusiastic young Taut, it would take a while to
understand that no matter how angelic the
architectural speech might be, as long as the main
issue remained to be seen merely as aesthetics, the
architect could not reach the public soul. In Modern
Architecture, Taut described the war years with a veiled
self-criticism and apology; the young architects of
Germany, he explained, ‘felt forced to give the
uttermost and noisiest vent to their own feelings […]
preaching and rhapsodizing about unity which
neither existed nor could be evolved [... T]his state of
mind, known as “Expressionism” was abandoned by
the best of them.’34 Nevertheless, in his own words,
the positive result of this creative exercise was the
‘emancipation of colour’ and glass which enabled
him to activate the key factor of the architectonic
quality, light.
For Paxton, the glass envelope was an instrument
used to measure and control the physical qualities
of interior space. For Taut, glass was an expressive,
artistic tool, and it brought on a surplus of
meaning that went beyond the pragmatic demands
of daily life. While Paxton read the architectural
surface literally in light of empiricist scientific logic,
Taut pursued an architectural narrative. The
theoretical models to which Paxton and Taut
referred still haunt architectural discourse and
continue to perform their heuristic function.
Therefore, like the potter in front of his kiln, perhaps
the use and exploration of glass or any other
material in architecture has never reached its
ultimate point. The fictive quality of architecture
leaves materials open to further interpretation
outside of the industrial milieu.
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Notes
1. Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime:
Selected Essays, trans. by M. Mitchell
(Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1997),
p. 149.
2. Loos, p. 150.
3. For Loos, as stated by Plato, the arts
were given to human beings as
godly skill, yet without fire they
could serve for nothing. Loos,
p. 150.
4. Loos, p. 150.
5. See, for instance, H. R. Hitchcock,
Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1958), p. 169; as
well as Colin Rowe and Robert
Slutzky, ‘Transparency: Literal and
Phenomenal’, 8 (1963), 45–54. Some
more recent publications may be
added to the list of works written
in the same framework, including
Michael Wigginton, Glass in
Architecture (London: Phaidon,
1996); Catherine Slessor, ‘Glass
Evolution’, Architectural Review no.
1215 (May 1998), 4–5; Susan
Dawson, ‘Glass Evolution’,
Architectural Review no. 1254
(August 2001), 94–97.
6. Casting a glance toward the variety
of ancient terms used to address
glass types in different qualities
and functions may be enough to
understand how the
announcement of transparency as
the ‘inherent character’ limits the
meaning of the word glass to a
single determined appearance of
the sand, lime, and soda amalgam.
Mary Luella Trowbridge, Philological
Studies in Ancient Glass (Urbana:
University of Illinois, 1930).
7. Taut cited both buildings in ‘The
Early Developments of Modern
Architecture’ chapter, in Modern
Architecture (London: The Studio,
1929), pp. 35–88.
8. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of
Architecture (London: Smith, Elder,
1849; repr. New York: Dover, 1989),
p. 9.
9. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice,
3 vols (London: Smith, Elder,
1851–53; repr. New York: Merrill
and Baker, [1897(?)]), I, 37.
10. Apparently, Ruskin made an effort
to emphasise the involvement of
non-technical agents in the
articulation of architecture.
Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, I, 37.
11. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, II, 396.
12. Paul Ricoeur, who sees the act of
‘building’ as a spatial reflection of
‘narrating’ (which takes place) in
time, draws a parallel between the
author and the architect’s
inventions. More precisely, Ricoeur
tends to interweave the
‘architectural configuration of
space’ with the ‘narrative
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configuration of time’. See Paul
Ricoeur, ‘Architecture et
narrativité,’ Arquitectonics 4 (2002),
9–29.
13. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. by Alexander
Nehamas and Paul Woodruff
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1995), p. 55 (261a).
14. Paxton admits that ‘the most
remarkable fact connected with
the Crystal Palace is the blotting
paper sketch indicates the
principal features of the building
as it now stands, as much as the
most finished drawings that have
been made since’. Joseph Paxton,
Daily News, August 7, 1851, quoted
in C. R. Fay, Palace of Industry
(Cambridge: At the University
Press, 1951), p. 11.
15. George F. Chadwick, The Works of Sir
Joseph Paxton 1803–1865 (London:
The Architectural Press, 1961), p. 76.
16. Describing his design procedure of
the Crystal Palace, Paxton made
clear that it was ‘to this plant and
to this circumstance that the
Crystal Palace owes its direct
origin’. Fay, p. 11.
17. Harry Francis Mallgrave,
‘Introduction’, in Gottfried
Semper, The Four Elements of
Architecture and Other Writings, trans.
by H. F. Mallgrave and Wolfgang
Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), p. 40.
18. Charles Dickens, ‘The Private
History of the Palace of Glass’,
Household Words no. 43 (January 18,
1851), 385–91 (p. 385).
19. ‘Das Glashaus hat keinen anderen
Zweck, als schön zu sein’. Bruno
Taut, Glashaus: Werkbundausstellung
Köln (Cologne: [n. pub.], 1914); repr.
in Frühe Kölner Kunstausstellungen,
Sondenburg 1912, Werkbund 1914,
Pressa 1928, ed. by W. Herzogenrath
(Cologne: Wienand, 1981), pp.
287–92.
20. Bruno Taut, ‘Eine Notwendigkeit’,
Der Sturm no. 196/7 (1914), 174–75;
repr. Taut, ‘A Necessity’, trans. by R.
H. Bletter in German Expressionism:
Documents from the End of the
Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of
National Socialism, ed. by R. Long
and others (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), pp. 124–26.
21. Taut wrote: ‘Das Tun des Menschen
bleibt nie beim Notwendigen
stehen. Die Welt lebt vom Prinzip
des Überflusses, in allen Dingen
muß das Maß überlaufen, wenn es
voll sein soll. Was nicht bis zum
Überlaufen voll ist, geht zugrunde.
Wir hoffen doch, solange wir
leben, daß wir nicht zugrunde
gehen. Und wenn das nicht
geschieht – nun, dann wird auch,
vielleicht bald, das “Überflüssige”
gebaut. Es muß dann gebaut
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theory arq . vol 11 . no 3/4 . 2007 243
werden, weg ja keine menschliche
Gesellschaft ohne dieses
“Überflüssige” bestehen kann.’
Taut, ‘Glaserzeugung und
Glasbau’, Qualität; Wirtschaftliche
Bildung und Qualitätsproduktion no.
1/2 (April/May 1920), 9–14 (p. 11).
22. Taut, ‘Glaserzeugung und
Glasbau’, 9.
23. Adolf Behne, ‘Die Wiederkehr der
Kunst’, in Schriften zur Kunst (Berlin:
Gebr. Mann, 1998), pp. 7–97.
24. August K. Wiedmann, Romantic
Roots in Modern Art, Romanticism and
Expressionism: A Study in Comparative
Aesthetics (Surrey: Gresham, 1979),
p. 155.
25. Dalibor Vesely, ‘Czech New
Architecture and Cubism’, Umeni 53
(2005), 586–604.
26. Taut, ‘Glaserzeugung und
Glasbau’, 12.
27. Alexander Nehamas and Paul
Woodruff, ‘Introduction’, in Plato,
Phaedrus, pp. ix–xlvii (p. x).
28. Nehamas and Woodruff, p. xvii.
29. Gardens of Adonis were baskets
and pots used to force plants
during the ancient Athenian
festival of Adonis.
30. Nehamas and Woodruff, p. xxxvi.
31. Plato, p. 81 (276b).
32. Chadwick, p. 43.
33. Nehamas and Woodruff, p. xi.
34. Taut, Modern Architecture, p. 93.
Acknowledgements
I thank Paul Emmons, Lindsay Falck,
Stanislaus Fung, David
Leatherbarrow, Clarissa A. Mendez,
Janell E. Robisch and Sebnem Yucel
Young for their valuable comments
on drafts of this essay.
Illustration credits
arq gratefully acknowledges:
Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 8, 9, 12;
Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, 10;
citizendium.org, 1, 5;
The community of inheritors of
Bruno Taut, 11;
V&A Images, Victoria and Albert
Museum, 4.
Biography
Ufuk Ersoy teaches at the Department
of Architecture, Izmir Institute of
Technology, Izmir, and at the
Program of Architecture, University of
New South Wales, Sydney. Currently,
he is completing his PhD. dissertation
entitled Seeing through Glass at the
University of Pennsylvania.
Author’s address
Ufuk Ersoy
Calle Gardenia cc-24
Borinquen Gardens, San Juan
Puerto Rico, 00926
USA
ersoy@design.upenn.edu
The fictive quality of glass Ufuk Ersoy
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