Der Raum als Membran
Edition Bauhaus 43 (Reprint)
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau/Siegfried Ebeling

Time and again »Der Raum als Membran« [»Space as Membrane«], published by Siegfried Ebeling as a kind of pamphlet in 1926 in Dessau — the artistic and technological laboratory of modernism—, caught the attention of his contemporaries. We find a copy on the desk of Walter Gropius at the Dessau Bauhaus, another one with notes from the hand of the architect at the library of Mies van der Rohe. And again and again whenever the utopian Bauhaus is mentioned, the title page of »Der Raum als Membran« reappears. The author, however, along with his other attempts to develop a theory of biological architecture, has disappeared from common memory. Siegfried Ebeling died 1963 in Hamburg, impoverished and isolated from post-war architecture. Together with the extensive essay »Das leichte Haus. Utopie und Realität der Membranarchitektur» [»The Light House. Utopia and Reality of Membrane Architecture«] by Walter Scheiffele we are publishing a reprint of »Der Raum als Membran«.