Remaking the Crust of the Earth

A layered cultural history of the origins, impacts and material legacy of glass

This layered, intertextual, cultural history examines humankind’s relationship with glass and the ways in which glass has transformed society and the constructed world. Remaking the Crust of the Earth considers glass in its myriad guises: from the modular prefabrication of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace to the utopian optimism of Paul Scheerbart's Glasarchitektur, both of which paved a way for for modernism, the curtain wall and the 20th-century glass house. Traversing time and space, the book includes archival material (in particular the encyclopaedic 1937 publication Glass in Architecture and Decoration by Raymond McGrath and A.C. Frost); excerpts from the film Remaking the Crust of the Earth; a series of restaged photographic glass tests conducted by Gavin Murphy and Louis Haugh; essays by Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll and Chris Fite-Wassilak; and reproductions from the Raymond McGrath collection in the Irish Architectural Archive.