Gottfried Semper: Der Stil. Kritische und kommentierte Ausgabe – Teil 3

Semper Edition started in 2017 as an edition project of documents relating to the two-volume publication Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder Praktische Aesthetik (Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics; 1860/63) by Gottfried Semper. The research-enabling role of the Edition is to make available for reading transcriptions of manuscripts representing the evolution of the text of Der Stil (drafts, fair copies, proofs, and print variants), its early predecessor, the never-published “Kunstformenlehre” (Theory of Art Forms), thought lost until  recently and little-studied since its re-discovery, and the manuscripts pertaining to the projected but never completed third volume of Der Stil, including those relating to the content of Semper’s lectures at the Eidgenössisches Polytechnikum in Zurich. The Edition provides researchers with an expanded source base where different documents may be easily compared to one another in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the ideas contained in Der Stil and their intellectual contexts. 

In the third and last funding period 2025-2028 the Semper Edition plans to continue expanding its research enabling services for scholars as readers and as consumers of data in both static and functionalised forms. We will edit three manuscript convolutes, which form part of Semper’s plan for the never-realised third volume of Der Stil: the manuscripts which relate more or less directly to the third volume, including Semper’s public lecture Ueber Baustyle (On Architectural Styles); the relevant drafts of the “Vergleichende Baulehre” (Comparative Theory of Building), and a selection of his Zurich lectures which survive as student notes. Indexing and commenting with respect to six entities (persons, places, cultures, organisations, theoretical terms, artefacts, bibliographical references) and specific text passages as developed in the previous phases will be continued. In addition to the already established contextualisation tools (commentary, entity listings, linking to authority files, and similarity), it’s planned to comment and link together Semper’s specific and unspecific references to passages of text by Semper within (and also outside) the Edition. Recognising the peculiarities of the materials to be edited in the third phase, commentary will also tackle the question whether the texts allow conclusions about the possible content and extent of the third volume.