Modern Visionaries

The exhibition focuses on architectural blueprints and designs by three early 20th-century visionaries. Around 1914, the novelist, poet and inventor Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) inspired the young architect Bruno Taut (1880-1938) with his ideas for coloured glass buildings. Paul Goesch (1885-1940), a trained architect, produced hundreds of fantasy drawings. He was one of the correspondents who contributed to the “Glass Chain”, that famous forum of utopian construction initiated by Taut in 1919.

While the economy of the young Weimar Republic struggled to recover, its pioneering art drew on highly versatile sources – from crystal grottoes to galactic castles in the air – precisely because there was so little money to build with. In the enthusiastic words of architect Walter Gropius at the time: “Dreamers, fantasists, visionaries […] that, in the final analysis, is what we want: utopia!”

The exhibition brings together about eighty vivid watercolours by Paul Goesch from the Berlinische Galerie’s own collection, most of them never shown before, along with drawings and texts by Paul Scheerbart, Bruno Taut and other members of the Glass Chain.