Gottfried Semper - London Writings

Gottfried Semper’s years in exile in London (1850–1855) were a time of highly inspir­ational experiences. The London of the first World Expo offered the German archi­tect an immense trove of objects for study and an intellectual surrounding that provided seminal impulses for his innovative cultural-­history­-based theory of archi­tecture. That revolutionary period found not only politics and society in radical upheaval, but also the world of art and science. Internationalization, and indeed glo­balization, of knowledge was thereby a particularly distinctive phenomenon, the most important place of which was the capital of the British Empire.