Blog

Bruno Taut’s Glass Architecture

 

Thinking recently about why art museums matter got me thinking about works of art and architecture that evoke a sense of reverence. These ruminations (along with others around meaningful integrations of glass in architecture) brought to mind Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion from 1914, one of my all-time favorite feats of glass architecture.

Taut’s Glass Pavilion was commissioned by the German glass industry for that year’s Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) exhibition in Cologne. While the piece served the practical purpose of showing new ways glass could be used in architecture, Taut had a deeper interest in the relationship of glass to human emotion and spirituality. He was particularly inspired by the writer Paul Scheerbart, whose utopian aphorisms about glass and color (e.g. “Colored glass destroys hatred”) eventually were inscribed on the lintels of the Glass Pavilion’s walls. The structure referenced certain features of temples, such as the long flights of steps leading to the raised entrance, while the large glass dome offered the nuance of gothic cathedrals and ancient glass iconography.

Yet, unlike more traditional structures, the building’s base was made of thick glass bricks, marking the first significant use of glass bricks in architecture. Taut also employed variety of strategies to envelope visitors with an extraordinary experience of light and color. The Glass Pavilion’s rhombic dome had a double skin of glass plates, resulting in mirror-like reflections on the exterior and wild prismatic projections of light and color inside. The interior was designed such that sunlight bounced all around between the glass dome, two flights of glass-treaded steps, fourteen mosaic glass walls, and a cascade of water leading down to a pool with underwater lighting. Who could enter a space like that and not be overcome with awe?

 

 

A fun mystery surrounding the Glass Pavilion is the question of Taut’s precise use of color. Only a few black and white photographs of the Glass Pavilion were taken; none exist in color. We do know he used colored glass and that the colors were bright; and we know something about the colors he used, as he once described “reflections of light whose colors began at the base with a dark blue and rose up through moss green and golden yellow to culminate at the top in a luminous pale yellow.” But that could manifest in so many different ways! Over the years, many people have created models of the Glass Pavilion, attempting to show how it might “really” have looked; but each one seems to have a vastly different interpretation of Taut’s colors.

 

 

Say, has anyone created a Glass Pavilion coloring book yet? Same line drawing on each page, but could color each one differently…