Carl Krayl

Who was Carl Krayl?

Carl Christian Krayl was a German architect and artist of the early twentieth century, who was associated with several of the leading avant-garde art movements of German Expressionism.

Krayl was born in Weinsberg, and educated at the school of applied arts and the technical college of Stuttgart. He began his career working for architects in Nuremberg and Freiburg. He did technical work in Ingolstadt during World War I.

In the years immediately after the War, Krayl was involved with the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, the November Group, the Glass Chain, and Der Ring, along with Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and other luminaries of the Expressionist movement. Krayl's paintings and drawings from this period are richly imaginative and visionary, with titles like "Cosmic building," "Dream city," and "Light greetings from my star house."

Krayl was one of the architects interested in the possibilities of the "glass architecture" advocated by the writer Paul Scheerbart. In 1920 Krayl began designing "suspended and swinging architecture," a feature of Scheerbart's 1914 novel The Gray Cloth. Krayl designed a "Crystaline Star House" that hung from the side of a cliff. Krayl also wrote a series of articles that were published in Taut's journal Frühlicht.