Glass Pavilion
Encyclopedia
The Glass Pavilion, built in 1914 and designed by Bruno Taut
Bruno Taut
Bruno Julius Florian Taut , was a prolific German architect, urban planner and author active during the Weimar period....

, was a prismatic
Cupola (geometry)
In geometry, a cupola is a solid formed by joining two polygons, one with twice as many edges as the other, by an alternating band of triangles and rectangles...

 glass
Glass
Glass is an amorphous solid material. Glasses are typically brittle and optically transparent.The most familiar type of glass, used for centuries in windows and drinking vessels, is soda-lime glass, composed of about 75% silica plus Na2O, CaO, and several minor additives...

 dome
Dome
A dome is a structural element of architecture that resembles the hollow upper half of a sphere. Dome structures made of various materials have a long architectural lineage extending into prehistory....

 structure at the Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...

 Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition
Werkbund Exhibition (1914)
The first Werkbund Exhibition of 1914 was held at Rheinpark in Cologne, Germany. Bruno Taut's best-known building, the prismatic dome of the Glass Pavilion of which only black and white images survive today, was in reality a brightly colored landmark. Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer designed a model...

. The structure was a brightly colored landmark of the exhibition, and was constructed using concrete
Concrete
Concrete is a composite construction material, composed of cement and other cementitious materials such as fly ash and slag cement, aggregate , water and chemical admixtures.The word concrete comes from the Latin word...

 and glass. The concrete structure had inlaid colored glass plates on the facade that acted as mirrors. Taut described his little temple of beauty as

Taut's Glass Pavilion is his best known single building achievement. He built it for the association of the German glass industry specifically for the 1914 exhibition. They financed the structure that was considered a house of art. The purpose of the building was to demonstrate the potential of different types of glass for architecture. It also indicated how the material might be used to orchestrate human emotions and assist in the construction of a spiritual utopia. The structure was made at the time when expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...

 was most fashionable Germany, and it is sometimes referred to as an expressionist-style building. The only known photographs of the building were made during 1914; due to their black and white nature, these photographs are only marginal representations of the actualities of the work. The building was destroyed soon after the exhibition since it was an exhibition building only and not built for practical use.

The Glass Pavilion was a pineapple-shaped multi-faceted polygonal designed rhombic structure. It had a fourteen-sided base constructed of thick glass bricks used for the exterior walls devoid of rectangles.Each part of the cupola was designed to recall the complex geometry of nature. The Pavilion structure was on a concrete plinth, the entrance reached by two flights of steps (one on either side of the building), which gave the pavilion a temple-like quality. Taut's Glass Pavilion was the first building of glass bricks of importance.
There were glass-treaded metal staircases inside that led to the upper projection room that showed a kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope
A kaleidoscope is a circle of mirrors containing loose, colored objects such as beads or pebbles and bits of glass. As the viewer looks into one end, light entering the other end creates a colorful pattern, due to the reflection off the mirrors...

 of colors. Between the staircases was a seven-tiered cascading waterfall with underwater lighting, this created a sensation of descending to the lower level 'as if through sparkling water'. The interior had prisms producing colored rays from the outside sunlight. The floor-to-ceiling colored glass walls were mosaic. All this had the effect of a large crystal producing a large variety of colors.

The frieze of the Glass Pavilion was written with aphoristic poems of glass done by the anarcho-socialist writer Paul Scheerbart
Paul Scheerbart
Paul Karl Wilhelm Scheerbart was an author of fantastic literature and drawings. He was also published under the pseudonym Kuno Küfer and is best known for the book Glasarchitektur ....

. Scheerbart's ideas also inspired the ritualistic composition of the interior. For Scheerbart, bringing in the moon's and the star's light brought in different positive feelings which led to a whole new culture.

Examples of these were
Paul Scheerbart
Paul Scheerbart
Paul Karl Wilhelm Scheerbart was an author of fantastic literature and drawings. He was also published under the pseudonym Kuno Küfer and is best known for the book Glasarchitektur ....

 in 1914 published a book called Glasarchitektur ("Architecture in glass") and dedicated it to Taut. Taut in 1914 founded a magazine called Frühlicht ("Dawn's Light") for his Expressionist devotees. It emphasized the iconography of glass which is also represented by his Glass Pavilion. This philosophy can be traced back to accounts of Solomon's Temple
Solomon's Temple
Solomon's Temple, also known as the First Temple, was the main temple in ancient Jerusalem, on the Temple Mount , before its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar II after the Siege of Jerusalem of 587 BCE....

. An early drawing of the Glass Pavilion by Taut says he made it in the spirit of a Gothic
Gothic architecture
Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....

cathedral.
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