A digital edition presents Gottfried Semper's writing “Style” for the first time in a critical version

The first version of the project is available online at external page semper-edition.ch. On the website, architects and historians can compare the manuscript and the digital version, track changes or deletions and browse through Semper's work using a full-text search. The digital version helps to better understand how the work was created and changed over 25 years. Sometimes a copyist has made a mistake. Or Semper himself made corrections on the galley proofs. 

“A thousand threads link contemporary architecture with the past,” says Michael Gnehm, who once completed his doctorate on Semper's architecture and language. “His work offers interesting theoretical considerations for today's practice because it goes back to the beginnings of architecture.” The digital edition allows a more differentiated view of the architect. Critical philological annotations make it possible to better understand the genesis of his thought. Around 1,200 commentaries to date also classify persons, places and terms. “Semper was a man of the 19th century, which was characterized by colonialism and imperialism,” says Michael Gnehm. “Our edition does not portray a hero, but rather emphasizes the links between Semper's position on architectural theory and architectural practice.”

The diversity of the material required a digital open access presentation. The website presents complex text levels in two windows side by side, so that Semper's conceptual universe can be experienced. A graph database was set up for this purpose, which relates the data sets to each other and links them to external materials and databases. Most of the manuscripts and handwritten notes were transcribed manually and some automatically using software from the Transkribus platform, which analyzes historical documents using artificial intelligence. 

The SNSF research project is divided into three phases. Funding of 1.25 million Swiss francs for the third phase was approved in October 2024. It will further expand the functions of the website and digitize Semper's manuscript “Vergleichende Baulehre” (Comparative Architecture) as well as the lectures he gave at ETH Zurich, which have been preserved in student transcripts. “Semper had a perfect sense of language, but often worked with convoluted sentences,” says Michael Gnehm. “The transcripts of his lectures that students made at the time are often easier to understand than his texts.” The digital edition makes Semper more accessible - and preserves his work for posterity.