Gottfried Semper

by Harry Francis Mallgrave

During an adventurous life, the German architect, scholar, and political revolutionary Gottfried Semper (1803-79) experienced early fame, political exile from his homeland, international prominence, and the exhilaration of seeing European architecture transformed by his influential body of ideas. In this engrossing biography of Semper - the first written on this architect - Harry Mallgrave presents a comprehensive account of the life, buildings, and writings of the man he describes as a colossus of the nineteenth century. Mallgrave weaves an engrossing saga of Semper's troubled youth, his fascination with the July Revolution in France, and his daring if somewhat imprudent voyage to a Greece wracked by civil war. He speaks of Semper's glorious design for the Dresden Hoftheater in the mid-1830s, his influence on Richard Wagner, and his plummeting fortunes after the political unrest of 1848-49. Mallgrave traces Semper's slow but determined literary resurrection that culminated with the pu