The Gray Cloth: A Novel on Glass Architecture

The German expressionist, architectural visionary, author, inventor, andartist Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) wrote several fictional utopian narrativesrelated to glass architecture. In The Gray Cloth, the first of his novels to betranslated into English, Scheerbart uses subtle irony and the structural simplicityof a fairy tale to present the theories of colored glass outline

The German expressionist, architectural visionary, author, inventor, andartist Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) wrote several fictional utopian narrativesrelated to glass architecture. In The Gray Cloth, the first of his novels to betranslated into English, Scheerbart uses subtle irony and the structural simplicityof a fairy tale to present the theories of colored glass outlined in his well-knowntreatise Glass Architecture.The novel is set forward in time to the mid-twentiethcentury. The protagonist, a Swiss architect named Edgar Krug, circumnavigates theglobe by airship with his wife, constructing wildly varied, colored-glass buildings.His projects include a high-rise and exhibition/concert hall in Chicago, aretirement complex for air pilots on the Fiji Islands, the structure for an elevatedtrain across a zoological park in northern India, and a suspended residential villaon the Kuria Muria Islands off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea. Fearing thathis architecture is challenged by the colorfulness of women's clothing, Krug insiststhat his wife wear all gray clothing with the addition of ten percent white. Thisodd demand brings him notoriety and sensationalizes his international buildingcampaign. For the reader, it underlines the confluence of architecture with fashion, gender, and global media.In his introduction, John Stuart surveys Scheerbart'scareer and role in German avant-garde circles, as well as his architectural andsocial ideas. He shows how Scheerbart strove to integrate his spiritual and romanticleanings with the modern world, often relying on glass architecture to do so. Inaddition to discussing the novel's reception and its rediscovery by contemporaryarchitects and critics, Stuart shows fiction to be a resource for the study ofarchitecture and places The Gray Cloth in the context of GermanExpressionism.