ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the paradoxical interactions of modernist architecture employing the material of glass with practices on paper. With its properties of transparency, reflectiveness, and lightness, glass was of central importance to architectural modernists. Glass also could represent a material on the verge of abolishing its own material presence. This dematerializing of modernist glass architecture found an important complement in “works on paper” of many sorts, especially in the utopian imaginings generated by the convergence of glass architecture and radical social hopes that emerged immediately after World War I. Paper offered a virtual intensification of the mobility and plasticity that glass construction promised, and an ability to design in new directions even in the absence of any possibility to build. Paper allowed a fluid movement between representational means, between visual and verbal means, between artistic architectural metaphors and actual architectural design, and between exploratory analysis and utopian visions. The article focuses particularly on the expressionist tendency represented by Scheerbart, Taut, and Behne; the incorporation of the glass architecture concept into the work and theories of László Moholy-Nagy; and the early work of Mies van der Rohe. It concludes with a brief discussion of Sergei Eisenstein's unrealized plan for a film.
