The Spirit of the Forest: Fairytales and Rustic Fantasy in Architecture 1890-1925

Writers, poets, composers and painters have long been absorbed by the fairy tale.  At the turn of the century, works like Hauptmann’s play Die versunkene Glocke (1896), Yeats’s collection of poems, Wind Among the Reeds (1899), and Bartók and Balász’s‌ opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) were all inspired by what Harold Bloom called the “beautiful, untrue things” of the fairy tale.

Writing about the charm of designer and artist Heinrich Vogeler’s house in the artists’ colony of Worpswede, Rilke quipped, “Actually it is a fairytale.”And, indeed, architects produced their own body of work inspired by folklore and fairy tales, and engendered with consolatory and wistful appeal. This lecture takes as its theme the fairy tale as an animating influence in works of Northern European architecture during the decades of transition into early modernism.  It looks at both the import and cultural significance of examples taken from the Amsterdam School, Jugendstil, and the Glasgow Four.