During an adventurous life, the German architect, scholar, and political revolutionary Gottfried Semper (1803-79) experienced early fame, political exile from his homeland, international prominence, and the exhilaration of seeing European architecture transformed by his influential body of ideas.

In this engrossing biography of Semper - the first written on this architect - Harry Mallgrave presents a comprehensive account of the life, buildings, and writings of the man he describes as a colossus of the nineteenth century.

Mallgrave weaves an engrossing saga of Semper's troubled youth, his fascination with the July Revolution in France, and his daring if somewhat imprudent voyage to a Greece wracked by civil war. He speaks of Semper's glorious design for the Dresden Hoftheater in the mid-1830s, his influence on Richard Wagner, and his plummeting fortunes after the political unrest of 1848-49.

Mallgrave traces Semper's slow but determined literary resurrection that culminated with the publication of his epoch-making book on style; he follows his artistic resurrection with a monumental practice in Zurich and Vienna. By the time of his spectacular design for the second Dresden Hoftheater in the early 1870s, Semper was without architectural peer in the German-speaking countries and his ideas had pushed European architecture to the brink of Modernism.