About the story
Although the story ventures far ahead into the realm of possibilities, it spares us a completed utopia. Instead, we are led from building site to building site, everywhere there is planning and work in progress, rarely is anything finished, many things don't work out, and we see less Edgar Krug's buildings than his building. In between, there is a conspicuous amount of partying and dancing.
Between Chicago, Borneo, Antarctica, Japan, India, the Churiya-Muriya Islands, Sardinia, Lüneburg Heath and Mont Blanc, the project manager tour around the world offers plenty of fuel for aesthetic controversies and interpersonal confusion.
The fact that this world dominated by artistic debates revolves around the aesthetics of glass architecture on the one hand and the aesthetics of costume on the other is one thing. The fact that there are no nationstate conflicts, no border controls and no military in this world, because the globalized terrestrial society has long since ceased to need these ancient measures, is another. It seems strangely normal. Independent as Scheerbart is, he eludes both the utopian and the dystopian pigeonhole.
Paul Scheerbart
Scheerbart is a master "imagineer". He does not write non-fiction books; he creates his future architecture in a casual, conversational tone without being imprecise. As his editor Mechthild Rausch writes, he practises "the staging of architectural ideas with narrative means." She continues: "Scheerbart was the first to call for the glass house and glass architecture as a universal architectural style. He also called for something new in formal terms. Instead of window glass and sober functional forms, he propagated colorful, ornamented glass and richly structured, variably designed buildings - in a word: "glass palaces".
"The house of the man of the future was to be furnished like a palace with the most precious enamel and mosaic, with the most delightful stained glass. Glass, the most brilliant building material on earth, was to play the leading role in the houses of the future."
-- Paul Scheerbart