Publisher's Synopsis
This layered, intertextual, cultural history examines humankind's relationship with glass and the ways in which glass has transformed society and the constructed world. It considers glass in its myriad guises, from the modular prefabrication of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace to the utopian optimism of Paul Scheerbart's Glasarchitektur, both of which paved a way for for modernism, the curtain wall and the 20th-century glass house.