| This dissertation addresses a critical lacuna in current perspectives on large-scale glass window installations since 1945, generically but inaccurately identified as "stained glass." The most influential postwar glass artists disseminated manifestos defining their design strategy as an applied art with intentional semiotic or compositional links to architecture and spatiality. They viewed traditional stained glass approaches as painterly, figurative, or didactic illustrations that merely filled apertures in the building fabric, otherwise lacking direct connections to architecture. In contrast, their program concepts effectively commemorate historical and archaeological narratives by emblematizing architectural elements, color hierarchies, and motifs excerpted directly from the host site, or known to exist in the past. In the process, Neues Glas designers often considered the same regional architectural distinctions and complicated restoration narratives as preservationists.; As this dissertation asserts, Germany's postwar reconstruction stimulated the unique conditions that gave rise to this significant conceptual departure in glass design, unparalleled in France, England, or other countries damaged during the war. Decimated by Allied bomb raids, innumerable landmarks required provisional and eventually permanent glazing replacements. A pervasively shattered sense of national identity demanded aesthetic responses that reinforced Germany's positive contributions to world culture without glossing over its complicity in the Holocaust. Additionally, traditional religious imagery in historic cathedrals or hastily constructed modern churches seemed irrelevant or impotent in a cynical, guilt-ridden, post-Holocaust society, necessitating new symbols and iconographies on altered platforms of meaning, leading to the use of quotidian symbols (i.e., stock market reports, fingerprints, EKG strips) to encapsulate theological meaning. Designers also experimented with light effects as metaphorical spaces, allowing 'room' ( Raum) for the cultivation of moral regeneration. Clear or opaque glass screens subsequently activated the use of glass as a metaphor for moral transparency, foreshadowing Sir Norman Foster's symbolically transparent dome on Berlin's Reichstag by three decades.; This unique conceptual innovation in glass has yet to be satisfactorily defined by a specific term in historical surveys. Formerly pinioned by its subsidiary status as a decorative art, glass as an architecturally linked design development, within the expanded context of postwar culture, receives its first critical analysis in this dissertation. |
