Gottfried Semper’s two volume «Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or Practical Aesthetics» (1860/63) is presented for the first time in a critical digital edition. All its different stages are made available as digital facsimiles and transcriptions: manuscripts, fair copies, proofs, prints and their variants, drawings for illustrations, woodcut proofs.
The critical digital edition will include the material belonging directly to «Style» on the one hand, and on the other hand manuscripts by Semper that cover its closer context. «Style»’s contextual material will contain Semper’s never published «Theory of Art Forms» wich he adapted for «Style», and drafts for his book project «Comparative Architecture», likewise never published, as well as the lectures held at ETH Zurich – two manuscript collections which Semper planned to rework into a third volume of «Style».
The complexity and amount of the material at stake, Semper’s heavily reworked manuscripts and the ensuing editorial task to provide them in their original, as well as edited, form, ask for a cutting-edge approach with respect to its digital, open-access presentation. This will include a commentary level that links the Semper edition with external material and databases. The Semper edition elaborates the digital infrastructure, above all the necessary graph database and long-term storage, in collaboration with Scientific IT Services of ETH Zurich.