The House that Semper Built

Gottfried Semper’s concept of Stoffwechsel continues to attract attention from scholars and practitioners, but the detailed context in which it emerged is little examined. Fascination with material culture and reclassification of artefacts as means of producing knowledge in the public domain were major aspects of this context. This paper will examine these with the focus on the elements of domesticity in the early formulation of Semper’s theory of architecture in the manuscript, Practical Art in Metal and Hard Materials (1852).