The Gray Cloth: Paul Scheerbart's Novel on Glass Architecture

by Paul Scheerbart, John A. Stuart (Introduction)

The German expressionist, architectural visionary, author, inventor, and artist Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) wrote several fictional utopian narratives related to glass architecture. In The Gray Cloth, the first of his novels to be translated into English, Scheerbart uses subtle irony and the structural simplicity of a fairy tale to present the theories of colored glass outlined in his well-known treatise Glass Architecture.

The novel is set forward in time to the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist, a Swiss architect named Edgar Krug, circumnavigates the globe by airship with his wife, constructing wildly varied, colored-glass buildings. His projects include a high-rise and exhibition/concert hall in Chicago, a retirement complex for air pilots on the Fiji Islands, the structure for an elevated train across a zoological park in northern India, and a suspended residential villa on the Kuria Muria Islands off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea. Fearing that his architecture is challenged by the colorfulness of women's clothing, Krug insists that his wife wear all gray clothing with the addition of ten percent white. This odd demand brings him notoriety and sensationalizes his international building campaign. For the reader, it underlines the confluence of architecture with fashion, gender, and global media.

In his introduction, John Stuart surveys Scheerbart's career and role in German avant-garde circles, as well as his architectural and social ideas. He shows how Scheerbart strove to integrate his spiritual and romantic leanings with the modern world, often relying on glass architecture to do so. In addition to discussing the novel's reception and its rediscovery by contemporary architects and critics, Stuart shows fiction to be a resource for the study of architecture and places The Gray Cloth in the context of German Expressionism.

Genres: Architecture, Fiction, Science Fiction

136 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1914

About the author

Paul Karl Wilhelm Scheerbart (8 January 1863 in Danzig – 15 October 1915 in Berlin) was a German author of fantastic literature and drawings. He was also published under the pseudonym Kuno Küfer and is best known for the book Glasarchitektur (1914).

Reviews

[Dara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scheerbart's novel drew my attention because it was about a proposed future architecture made all of colored glass, written on the eve of World War I. This is the kind of novel you don't see too much anymore, especially in the States - as much a narrative as a treatise on a futurist architectural movement. It's science-fiction too, proposing a 1950s full of enormous glass monoliths, airships and the like, and its characters are surprisingly well-drawn and humorous for something that sounds so dry in concept. But to be honest with you I'm not drawn to architecture, nor to philosophical discussions about it. What gave this work any traction for me was thinking about its central narrative conceit - that pioneering glass architect Edward Krug has compelled his wife Clara by contract to always wear gray so that she won't overshadow his colorful buildings. There's a wonderful sequence where Clara finally breaks out of her husband's oppressive demands, throwing a colorful party while she plays an enormous pipe organ in an Indian zoo. But soon after, having tasted this sweet freedom and release once, Clara willingly adopts the gray cloth in support of her husband's architectural vision. It's sad, too, because Clara is the beating heart of the piece. I'd much rather have read about her ditching her nerd husband and having a fantastic musical career with all the other interesting rogues who populate the book.

[Steve Chisnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel comes close to offering a taste of Scheerbart's thinking and aesthetic, but what there is falls short in a few key areas.

First, Scheerbart's larger idea of openness/light/color/space as a means to expand or alter the consciousness is a grand and important idea (that architecture here therefore dominates vain personal choices like fashion is evident). However, while this claim finds it nuances and evolving contexts in the work, the consciousness work itself is largely absent. In other words, if you're looking for an introduction to Scheerbart's broader thinking, this will not provide it.

So that leaves the novel to stand on its own (unless you are reading it as part of a larger collection of Scheerbart). On this level, as architectural utopia, it's a fairly beautiful fantasy. A kind of turn-of-the-century steampunk-engineered foray into glass and light and color, there is nothing like it which I have seen. Though here, too, Scheerbart does not aspire to utopia, really. His works and designs remain for the very rich; that servants and workers are constantly on beck and call, are subjected to ever-changing work conditions, are offered no voice through the novel, and that no apologies or expectations are made that anyone will ever enjoy the new designs but those who can afford them and have idle money to spend--these do not a utopia make.

As a non-utopic novel, finally, it is passably interesting, though the personalities of the characters and their development seem incidental to our author. They are undeveloped or largely static, acting for motives which are singular or from an ennui of indolence. For this, however, the work is quite short, and reads more like an exercise in where and how color might be installed than a story where characters are important.

Satire? Irony? There is and there may be more than I saw. However, for satire to work, a reasonable anchor point must be established from which the absurd might be measured. If all the characters (and the larger society) are equally absurd, that irony is lost.

I enjoyed and appreciated the read; but I cannot recommend it to all but a very peculiar niche of readers.

[Bertrand · Rating 3 out of 5]

That is a book I have been meaning to read for a long time without having the chance to fit it: on the paper all is there – a megalomaniac architectural project, an unrestrained utopia of technological marvels, an idealist subtext of art changing society and a concern for the social and cultural conundrums of the Belle Époque. However this is what the Japanese would today call a “light novella” so those themes are woven into a slightly nebulous and fore-mostly entertaining story, which might have aimed at familiarizing the public with the images and poetics of glass architecture, but comes nowhere close to formulating an actual theory.
Thus the appeal should not be sought in what it says about architecture, not even about what it reveals about the relationship between architecture and fiction, but rather in the peculiar room it leaves for design within popular culture.
The story goes something like this: Herr Krug, a world famous architect of the future, obsessed with coloured glass, wed Frau Clara, a rather modern organist, on the condition (mentioned in their marriage contract) that she should wear exclusively clothing in grey with a ten-percent highlight of white. This is meant to compliment the play of light which is central to her husband’s architectural vision, and brings about no end of comical and picaresque adventures while the couple travel in their air-ship to building sites all over the world. Haunted by the fear of being objectified by her new husband, Clara persistently questions the single rule established by her Herr Krug and increasingly resents what amounts to a gagging order.
Those premises allow for many grand visions of architectural utopias, which nonetheless always remain off-set by Scheerbart’s irreverent and playful irony, keeping the story firmly anchored in the burlesque. Unfortunately the uptight and easy slapstick has not aged so well and converge with the lavish settings and ubiquitous descriptions of a lavish life-style to emphasize the historical distance that separate us from the intended readers. This leaves us with a spectacular fable that tackles, without resolving, some important issues: the question of creative hegemony, and the relationship between a totalizing architecture and the de-centered, individual character of design and fashion in particular. Other themes hover at the periphery of the story, such as the interactions of fame and creative freedom, the role of the intellectual in mass-society, as well as, of course, those of the negotiation of gender relations in a modern(ist) utopia.

[Wendy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whatever you do, do not read the introduction. I repeat... Do not read the introduction. Or, if you must, read the introduction after reading the novel.

I attempted to begin reading this three times before I finally got through it. Each time I was put off by the introduction. It is too dense, too scholarly. I wish that I had allowed myself to simply enjoy the novel.