Scheebart was born in Danzig in 1863 and moved to me Berlin in his 20s in order to achieve his dreams of being a writer, his early work included work of fantasy and and science fiction which are now categorized as expressionist or surrealist. Scheebart believed that the techonological advancements and industrial breakthroughs of the early 20th century could lead the way to momentous transformation that would make the built environments “heaven on earth”.
He mentions
“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—colored glass.”
Scheebart was also admired by the architect Bruno Taut after the met at a glass painting workshop in 1913 and later
influenced his glass house from the 1914 werkbund exhibition. Taut glorified the use of glass in his work. Scheebart’s poetry was so influential to Taut’s architecture that he has lines inscribed from scheebart’s poems into the glass pavillion.
At a time where modernist architecture were forgetting about color lessons they had learned from artists like van Dousberg and Mondrian. Whereas Scheebart made it a focus in his version of modernism as he focuses on the demonstrative color, the dematerialization of traditional solids and glitter and light which wasn’t prioritized in the modern world. Subsequently taut used color schemes to highlight mechanical gadgets or machines. For example in a red room, the pipes would be painted yellow and this was taut’s way of showing that he was proud of his technological achievements down to the smallest detail such as a handle, it is all rendered rhetorical by the use of color which makes always makes it stand out in the room.
Scheerbart conjured a more generous future than the one we actually got, but one that isn’t too far off the mark. “When there is more glass everywhere,” he wrote, “fireworks will be transformed; thousands of reflection effects will be possible.” It’s as if he’d spent Fourth of July weekend in any metropolitan city in the USA or evenings in Dubai where the firework and fountain lights shine on the plethora of glass buildings that surround it such as the burn The main difference, however, is that a structure like the Burj Khalifa fabricates transparency, while actually concealing what goes on within it. Scheerbart, by contrast, seems to look forward to a society founded on genuinely transparent labor. Opposed to the opacity of brick, a city of glass “would be as splendid as in the gardens of the Arabian Nights.
