Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!
A Paul Scheerbart Reader
Edited by Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin
320 pages
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64 color plates, 48 line drawings
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7 x 10
Review Quotes
Choice
“This latest installment in the ongoing English-language discovery of Scheerbart (1863–1915) is well worth purchasing for its reissue of Glass Architecture above all but also for its enthusiastic celebration of this quirky, still-surprising author. . . . Recommended."
Karrie Jacobs | Architect
“I was delighted to discover . . . the first English language compendium of Scheerbart’s work. . . . Scheerbart is well worth discovering—or rediscovering—not just because he was uncannily prescient, but because his good-natured manifestos are so at odds with those of his more famous contemporaries. Ornament in Scheerbart’s universe is never a crime. Machines are objects of fascination, but we don’t have to live in them. And most of the world’s problems can be solved simply by building walls of multicolored glass.”
San Francisco Book Review
“There’s really only one poet of architecture, and that’s Paul Scheerbart. . . . Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is a curious hybrid of ideas, idealism, and passion, shining an overdue spotlight on a singular artistic voice.”
Apollo
“Scheerbart’s glass is iridescent, coloured, shaped; glass mosaic, glass prisms, ‘glass hair’, designed not to reflect, or to see through, but to create complex kaleidoscopic effects. The uses Scheerbart wants it put to are even more improbable and utopian, and phrased in his delightfully modest, gently insistent style. . . . Josiah McElheny’s contemporary glass artworks, spread across the text, give much more of a sense of what Scheerbart expected from the glass world.”
Lynne Tillman, author of What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
“‘Colored glass destroys all hatred at last.’ I want to think about this sentence—and Scheerbart—forever. Scheerbart invents possibility.”
Lynne Cooke, 2012–2014 Andrew W. Mellon Professor, CASVA, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
“Rarely are the obscure so richly resurrected as Scheerbart is in this dense, absorbing volume. While preserving his crystalline quirkiness it lays bare for the first time the nexus of dazzling visions, timely theories, and compulsive conjecturing that made him a singular figure in his own day and a beacon in ours . . .”
Sean Keller, Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture
“An exciting and novel project that will encourage renewed attention to the beguiling and fantastical work of Paul Scheerbart, an indispensable figure for understanding the long heritage of our technologically permeated present.”
For more information, or to order this book, please visit https://www.press.uchicago.edu
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Architecture: Architecture--Criticism
Art: Art--General Studies
History: European History
Literature and Literary Criticism: Germanic Languages
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