contemporary architecture essay

opposite: Fumihiko Maki. Congress Center, Salzburg, Austria. Competition proposal, 1992. Detail of Rainerstra& (principal) facade

Terence Riley Light Construction

Tn recent years a new architectural sensibility has emerged, one that not only reflects

the distance of our culture from the machine aesthetic of the early twentieth centu­

ry but marks a fundamental shift in emphasis after three decades when debate about

architecture focused on issues ofform. Tn projects notable for artistic and technical

innovation, contemporary designers are investigating the nature and potential of

architectural surfaces. They are concerned not only with their visual and

qualities but with the meanings they may convey. Influenced by of our culture

including electronic media and the computer, architects and artists are rethinking

the interrelationships of architecture, visual perception, and structure.

Represented in this survey are some thirty projects, created in response to com­

missions and competitions in ten countries. As the majority of the works have been

or are being built, they engage their environments on material as well as theoretical

levels. This essay situates the projects in a broad, synthetic context, addressing both

their cultural and aesthetic dimensions. Priority is given to the visual encounter with

a structure, a choice that is not meant to imply a hierarchy of importance but to rec­

ognize that the appearance of architecture provides not only the initial but frequently

the most defining contribution toward its eventual comprehension.

The sensibility expressed in these projects refers, but does not return, to the

visual objectivity embraced by many early modernists, particularly as it is expressed

in their fascination with glass structures. Ludwig Hilberseimer's 1929 essay "Glas­

represents that rationalist outlook and serves as a historical antipode to

contemporary attitudes. For him the use of glass in architecture furthers hygienic

and economic goals; he discusses its formal properties only insofar as they enable the

architect more clearly to express the structural system. Aesthetic concerns are

essentially negated: "Glass is all the fashion today. Thus it is used in ways that are fre­

quently preposterous, having nothing to do with functional but only formal and dec­

orative purposes, to call attention to itself; and the result, grotesquely, is that very

often glass is combined with the load-bearing structure in such a way that glass's

characteristic effects of lightness and transparency become completely 10st:'1

Hilberseimer's sachlich approach contains its own understated implications for

an aesthetic vision. Describing the Crystal Palace, London (1850-51), which "for

the first time showed the possibilities of iron and glass structures:' Hilberseimer

writes, "It obliterated the old opposition oflight and shadow, which had formed the

9

1: Michael Vall Valkenburgh.

'e lee Walls, Cambridge,

·husetts. Instal/atioll, 1988

proportions of past architecture. It made a space of evenly distributed brightness;

it created a room of shadowless light:'2 The extensive use, in contemporary archi­

tecture, of semitransparent glazing materials (such as frosted or mottled glass),

translucent plastic sheathings, double layers of glass (which, even if clear, produce

enough reflections to function as screens), and an apparently infinite number of

perforated materials, results in spaces very different from Hilberseimer's

"room of shadowless light." Indeed, recent projects point to the possibility

that "transparency" can also express the shadows of architecture.

The literary critic Jean Starobinski begins his essay "Poppaea's Veil": "The

hidden fascinates:'3 His title refers to a passage in Montaigne's essay "That

difficulty increases desire" (II: 15), where the philosopher examines a com­

plicated relationship between Poppaea, who was Nero's mistress, and her

admirers: "How did Poppaea hit on the idea of hiding the beauties of her face

behind a mask if not to make them more precious to her lovers?"4

Starobinski analyzes the veil: "Obstacle and interposed sign, Poppaea's veil

engenders a perfection that is immediately stolen away, and by its very flight

demands to be recaptured by our desire:'5 To describe the action of the view­

er, Starobinski rejects the term vision, which implies an immediately penetrating

certitude, in favor of gaze: "If one looks at the etymology, one finds that to denote

directed vision French resorts to the word regard [gaze], whose root originally

referred not to the act of seeing but to expectation, concern, watchfulness, consid­

eration, and safeguard:'6 Starobinski's metaphor is literary, but it easily translates

into architectural terms: the facade becomes an interposed veil, triggering a subjec­

tive relationship by distancing the viewer of the building from the space or forms

within and isolating the viewer within from the outside world.

Created by streams of water running over light-gauge metal fencing in frigid

weather, Michael Van Valkenburgh's elegantly simple Radcliffe Ice Walls (Cambridge,

Massachusetts, 1988, fig. 1 and pp. 34-35) gives the metaphor substance: like

Poppaea's veil, the walls interpose between the viewer and the landscape an

ephemeral material (a frozen cloud) and an image (the fence) signifying protection or

': Fumihiko Maki. Congress

Salzburg, Austria. Competition

I, 1992. Exploded diagram

obstacle. Another germane example is the Ghost House by Philip Johnson (New

Canaan, Connecticut, 1985, pp. 36-37), also made of chain-link fencing, which recalls Frank Gehry's made from off-the-shelf materials and

Robert Trwin's diaphanous landscape projects. This minimalist rendition ofthe

archetypal house was designed as a nursery, a latter-day lath house, for growing

flowers. The chain-link surfaces not only render the house and its interior as a spec­

tral form but prevent foraging deer or other inquisitive visitors from reaching the

flower beds: a most succinct representation of Poppaea's distanced perfection, a lit­

eral expression of the watchful and concerned gaze.

A similarly mediated relationship between the viewer and a distanced space

within can be seen in larger, more complex projects such as the Saishunkan Seiyaku

Women's Dormitory by Kazuyo Sejima (Kumamoto, Japan, 1991, pp. 38-43) and

Fumihiko Maki's project for a new Congress Center in Salzburg (1992, pp. 8 and

44-47). The dormitory's heavily screened facades, finely perforated like a sieve,

figure 3: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meumn. Goetz Collection,

Munich. 1992

Figure 4: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Farnsworth House,

Plano, lIlinois. 1946-51

provide maximum blockage with the fewest of hints of the interior spaces. Inside,

these spaces are relatively free and open, with light filtering through the facades

and descending from above. Still, various screened materials used throughout the

project impose physical limitations on vision. The Congress Center's facades are

more open, but the distance between the viewer and the space within is no less rig­

orously maintained. As in a Russian doll, the spaces nest one inside another, farther

and farther removed from the viewer's grasp (fig. 2).

Tn these projects and others, the distance created between the viewer and the

space within suggests, on some level, a voyeuristic condition made explicit in a gym­

nasium designed by Charles Thanhauser and Jack Esterson (New York City, 1993,

pp. 48-49). Tn place of typical locker rooms for showering and changing are four

freestanding cubicles within the training area, partially enclosed in frosted glass.

From various perspectives, the obscured images of athletes dressing and undressing

can be observed, accentuating the sensual aspects of physical culture. As in Alfred

Hitchcock's Rear Window, the anonymity and detachment of the images enhance

sensuality; in Montaigne's words, they "entrap our desires and ... attract us by keep­

ing us at a distance:'7

That all of the preceding projects might be referred to as "transparent" suggests

a newfound interest in a term long associated with the architecture of the modern

movement. Yet the tension between viewer and object implied by the use of the archi­

tectural facade as a veiling membrane indicates a departure from past attitudes and

a need to reexamine the word transparency as it relates to architecture. The presence

of a new attitude is confirmed by a brief glance at such

projects as the Goetz Collection by Jacques Herzog and

Pierre de Meuron (Munich, 1992, pp. 50-53), the Cartier

Foundation for Contemporary Art by Jean Nouvel (Paris,

1994, pp. 54-59), or the TTM Building by Toyo Ito

(Matsuyama, Japan, 1993, pp. 60-65). The Goetz Collec­

tion, whose supporting structure is enclosed between the

frosted surfaces of a double-glass facade, appears ghost­

like, a complete reversal of the of the so­

called Miesian glass box (figs. 3 and Seen through a

freestanding, partially glazed palisade, the frame structure

of the Cartier Foundation is more explicit and the use of

clear plate glass more extensive than in the Goetz

Collection. Even so, the Cartier Foundation achieves

extreme visual complexity-"haze and evanescence" in the

words of the architect-due to the overlapping buildup of

views and multiple surface reflections. Transparency in the

TTM Building and the Cartier Foundation is not created

simply by applying a glass curtain wall to the exterior of

the building'S frame. Rather, the jdea of transparency is

present deep within the structures; one seems to be sus­

pended within multiple layers of transparency, not only

10 11

, Rem Koolhaas-O.M.A. )que Nationale de France,

)mpetition pmposal, 1989.

etric

..

vertical wall surfaces but horizontal surfaces such as the translucent floor panels of

Nouvel's project and the reflective floor and ceiling materials of the ITM Building.

About the latter, the critic Yoshiharu Tsukamoto has noted: "The result is an

bleached of all sense we customarily associate with the materials, sublimated into an

experience of 'weightlessness; in Ito's own terminology:'8

Hilberseimer's ideal of shadowless light is difficult to see in the banal office tow­

ers and residential blocks erected in the postwar building boom. The depredations of

the debased International Style of those years provided fertile ground for critics of

both the modern rationalists and their latter-day followers. The antipathy of the

architectural historian Colin Rowe for the kind of architecture proposed by

Hilberseimer was buttressed by a distaste for the technological, anticlassical ethos of

the glass curtain wall, which he felt was bereft of the intellectual complexities to be

found in the traditional facade. Tn his critique of the purported objectivity of the early

modern rationalists, Rowe found an ally in the painter Robert Slutzky, a former stu­

dent of Josef Albers. Slutzky'S interest in Gestalt psychology had led him to question

the claims to objectivity of some modern painters. Together, they wrote in 1955-56

the essay "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal," which was first published in 1963

and was widely read in the 1960s, influencing several generations of American archi­

tects. In it they state: "[The observer] may enjoy the sensation oflooking through a

glass wall and thus be able to see the interior and the exterior of the building simul­

taneously; but, in doing so, he will be conscious of few of those equivocal emotions

which derive from phenomenal transparency."9 They propose "phenomenal trans­

parency" as an abstract, theoretical sense of transparency derived from skillful for­

mal manipulation of the architectural facade, viewed frontally, as opposed to the

more straightforward "literal transparency" that they ascribe to the curtain-wall

architecture of the modern rationalists.

Rem Koolhaas's 1939 Bibliotheque Nationale de France project (fig. 5), a mas­

sive, glass-enclosed cubic structure, offers a kind of transparency that appears to

entirely outside Rowe and Slutzky'S scheme: a building with the visual complexity

they sought, which nevertheless rejects the traditional facade that Rowe ultimately

defended. It is a building in which transparency is conceived, in the words of the

architectural historian Anthony Vidler, "as a solid, not as a void, with the interior vol­

umes carved out of a crystalline block so as to float within it, in amoebic suspension.

These are then represented on the surface of the cube as shadowy presences, their

three-dimensionality displayed ambiguously and flattened, superimposed on one

another in a play of amorphous densities." Vidler also takes us a step further toward

understanding the new direction of contemporary architecture: "The subject is sus­

pended in a difficult moment between knowledge and blockage:'10

The visual experience described by Vidler is certainly not the type that Rowe and

Slutzky disparage as literal. But does the viewer's ambiguous perception ofthe build­

ing's interior volumes evoke those "equivocal emotions" that derive, those authors

argue, from phenomenal transparency? The word ambiguous plays an important role

both in their writings and in the more recent ones of Koolhaas; but it is not enough

to think that all things ambiguous are necessarily related. The distinction between

Figure 6, Pablo Picasso. Man with

a Clarinet. 1911. Oil on canvas,

41 3/8 x 27 3116 in. MuseD Thy,'Sen'

Bornemisza, Madrid

Figure 7, Georges Braque. The Portuguese. 1911-/2. Oil on canvas, 46 x 32 in. Offentfiche KUllstsammlung Basel. Kunstmuseum. Gift of Dr. h. c. Raoul La Roche, 1952

the experience of Koolhaas's design, as Vidler describes it. and the terms of analysis

proposed by Rowe and Slutzky can best be understood if we look to the passage in

which they use paintings Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque to provide a "previ­

sion;' as they call it, ofliteral and phenomenal transparency.11 They see Picasso's Man

with a Clarinet of 1911 (fig. 6) as an example of literal transparency, "a positively

transparent figure standing in a relatively deep space"; only gradually does the

observer "redefine this sensation to allow for the real shallowness of the space."

Braque's The Portuguese of the same year (fig. 7) reverses this experience: the paint­

ing's "highly developed interlacing of horizontal and vertical gridding ... establishes a

primarily shallow space"; only then does the viewer "become able to invest this space

with a depth:'

At this point it seems necessary to separate Rowe from Slutzky, whose concerns

led him into a deep investigation of the relationship between the fine arts and

psychology of perception. 12 While admiring Slutzky's analysis, Rowe is

concerned with how the cubist paintings might support his conviction that modern

architecture represents nothing more than a formal evolution out of, rather than a

break with, the architecture of the classical past. Disregarding the fundamental dif­

ferences between traditional perspectival construction and synthetic cubism, and

setting aside for the moment the differences between Man with a Clarinet and The

Portuguese on which Rowe and Slutzky we can three aspects of the

paintings that made them useful to Rowe for architectural analysis: their frontality,

analogous to that ofthe traditional facade; their figure-ground relationships, which

privileged formal discernment; and their synthetic spatial depth, which suggested to

Rowe an affinity with the compositional elements of the classical orders. Thus, the

analytical tools developed by Slutzky to undermine rationalist objectivity in painting

12 13

: Marcel Duchamp. The Bride

Bare by Her Bachelors, Even

rge Glass). 1915-23. Oil, var­

dfoil, lead wire, and dust on

;s panels (cracked), each mount­

een two glass panels, with five

'ips, aluminum foil, and a wood

I frame, 109 112 x 69 1/4 in.

'phia Museum of Art, Bequest

rine S. Dreier, 1953

ironically serve Rowe to defend the objective viewpoint of the architectural con­

noisseur. Tn an extended comparison of Gropius's Bauhaus workshop wing, dis­

playing literal transparency, and Le Corbusier's Villa Garches, representing phe­

nomenal transparency, Rowe and Slutzky even criticize Gropius for

"relying on the diagonal viewpoint;' rather than the fixed, orthogo­

nal viewpoint of Le Corbusier's work and, for that matter, the can­

vases of Picasso and Braque.13 Tn so doing, they continue, Gropius

"has exteriorized the opposed movements of his space, has allowed

them to flow away into infinity:'

Regardless of their ultimate positions, Rowe and Slutzky's ideas

about transparency rest on the premise that the viewer has visual

access to the object, either by penetrating to it directly or by con­

structing a visual path through the shallow space of the Cubist grid.

Vidler's term blockage has no function in a discussion of penetrating

the spaces created by Picasso and Braque (or Rowe's architectural

exemplar, Le Corbusier), but the term strongly resonates with the

work of Marcel Duchamp, particularly his Large Glass of 1915-23

(fig. 8). For Duchamp the surface of the Large Glass is a kind of

threshold, distinct from the object itself, suggesting a subjective ten­

sion between the viewer and the object like that created by

Poppaea's veil; it is to be "looked at rather than through;' in the

words of the architecture critic Kenneth Frampton.14 Another way

of describing the effect on the viewer is suggested by Octavio Paz;

whereas Picasso's work represents "movement before painting;' Paz

explains that "right from the start Duchamp set up a vertigo of delay in opposition

to the vertigo of acceleration. Tn one of the notes in the celebrated Green Box he

writes, 'use delay instead of "picture" or "painting"; "picture on glass" becomes

"delay in glass:""15

Frampton's comments on the Large Glass are made in an essay in which he com­

pares Duchamp's great work to Pierre Chareau's 1932 Maison de Verre, a long­

neglected masterpiece of prewar architecture, which ran completely against the grain

of modern rationalist thought (fig. 9). It was sheathed in layers of transparent and

translucent materials, which alternately obscured and revealed a sequence of views­

"ambiguous characteristics;' Frampton notes, which "would surely have been anath­

ema to the fresh air and hygiene cult of the mainstream Modern Movement."16

Though the glass architecture of the Maison de Verre might have been dismissed by

the rationalist Hilberseimer, it remains resistant to the visual delectation espoused by

Rowe. Frampton points out that it served as both a private residence and gynecolo­

gist's office, a combination offunctions richly analogous to the division of the Large

Glass into the Bride's domain above and that of the eroticized Bachelor Apparatus

below. Frampton writes, "The works are unclassifiable in any conventional sense;

they are 'other' in the deepest sense of the word and this 'strangeness' is a conse­

quence of their opposition to the mainstream of Western art after the Renaissance:'17

Frampton's writings, which underpin many of the thoughts expressed here by myself

Figure 9: Pierre Chareau. Maison

de Verre, Paris. 1932. Facade

Figure 10: Rem Koolhaas-O.M.A.

BibliotMque Nationale de France,

Paris. Competition proposal, 1989.

PeripMrique facade

and others, point to the relationship between delay in glass and a potential delay in

architecture that this essay attempts to establish.

These modes of delay resist the kind of classification that inevitably results from

visual objectivity's fixed point of reference. Herzog and de Meuron's 1989 project for

a Greek Orthodox Church in Basel and Ben van Berkel's ACOM Office Building ren­

ovation (Amersfoort, the Netherlands, 1993, pp. 66-67) provide examples of "delay

in architecture:' The church is a volume of glass and translucent marble enclosing a

second volume of translucent alabaster, which is the sanctuary. On the alabaster are

ghostlike photo-etched images of ancient icons, which act as filters, interposing faith,

history, and memory, "delaying" the headlong rush of visual perception into the inte­

rior. The new facades surrounding the ACOM Office Building similarly provide a

visual threshold, revealing the "memory" of the preexisting structure, built in the

1960s and now subsumed. Van Berkel employs translucent materials and perforated

screens to hinder visual penetration, creating the greatest possible distance between

the interior and exterior membranes.

Like Poppaea's veil, these facades have a positive presence and, in distancing the

viewer, a specific function: they are something inserted between. The facades of

Koolhaas's library not only transmit the shadowy presences of forms within but

acknowledge equally amorphous forms without, specifically clouds, whose generic

shapes are etched on the Paris and Peripherique facades (fig. 10). In this respect as

well as in acting as thresholds, Koolhaas's facades have a certain affinity with the

Large Glass, whose upper panel is dominated by the image of a cloud. The cloud is

an appropriate symbol of the new definition of transparency: translucent but dense,

substantial but without definite form, eternally positioned between the viewer and

the distant horizon. Koolhaas describes the library's facades: "transparent, some­

times translucent, sometimes opaque; mysterious, revealing, or mute .... Almost nat­

ural-like a cloudy sky at night, like an eclipse:'18

The "mysterious" facades mentioned by Koolhaas and the "haze and evanes­

cence" that Nouvel sees in the Cartier Foundation originate in conditions Rowe and

Slutzky somewhat derisively refer to as the "haphazard superimpositions provided by

the accidental reflections of light playing upon a translucent or polished surface:'19

But the architects' words are not simply poetic, and the effect they describe is not

haphazard, as a brief excursion into quantum electrodynamics may suggest.

Transparent and translucent materials allow some photons (particles of light) to pass

through them while they partially reflect others. This activity in the surface of the

transparent membrane can account for the reflection of as much as 16 percent of

the light particles that strike it, creating visible reflections and, frequently, a palpa­

ble luminescence. 2o The doubling of the glass found in many of the projects here

increases the potential for the glass surface to cast back photons: up to 10 percent of

those that pass through the outer layer are reflected by the inner one; still others ric­

ochet between the two. The dynamics of light passing through transparent surfaces

is described as a "slowing" of light by the physicist Richard Feynman. 21 The similar­

ity of his term to Duchamp's "delay in glass" provides a striking bridge between the

languages of the physicist and the artist.

14 15

Figure 12: Reconstruction of Brunelleschis perspective experiment,

1417. After Alessandro Parronchi,

Studi su la dolce prospettiva (Milan: A. Martello, 1964), fig. 91

1994. see fig. 26) proposed by David Chipperfield, and other projects all show a

dense volume surrounded by open, unprogrammed space, itself enclosed by a glazed

skin. Analogous to thermally efficient double-glazed walls, these designs isolate activ­

ities from light, sound, or heat. Yet the extravagance of these efficiencies reminds us

that isolation is not simply a functional goal in these structures, but a visual and ulti­

one.

The tension between viewer and object engendered by the use ofveil-like built-up

membranes parallels a tension between architectural surface and architectural form

that is evident in many of the works presented here. The art historian Hubert

Damisch has written at length about the invention of perspective drawing, one of the

principal design tools since the Renaissance, and its inherent bias toward form:

"Perspective is able to comprehend only what its system can accommodate: things

that occupy a place and have a shape that can be described by Iines."22 Damisch fur­

ther notes that the limitations of perspective's ability to describe visual experience

were apparent even at its inception. He cites Brunelleschi's 1417 experiment in which

he tested the accuracy of his perspective drawing of the Baptistery of San Giovanni,

seen from the door ofthe Cathedral in Florence. The drawing on a panel was held by

the observer, who peered through a small hole in the back of it toward the Baptistery

while holding at arm's length a mirror that reflected the right half of the panel, thus

allowing him to compare the actual view of the structure with the reflection of

Brunelleschi's drawing of it (fig. 12). Damisch notes that the architect attempted to

compensate for the limitations he clearly saw in his drawing system: having rendered

the Baptistery and the surrounding square, Brunelleschi added a layer of silver leaf to

the upper area of the panel to mirror the sky and the clouds, those aspects of the

actual view that escaped his system of perspective. Brunelleschi's addition of silver

leaf not only "manifests perspective as a structure of exclusion, the coherence of

which is based upon a set of refusals; but, by reflecting the formlessness of the uuuu~,

must "make room ... for even those things which it excludes from its system:'23

Many ofthe projects presented here exhibit a similarly compensatory attitude, an

attempt to "make room" for that which neither perspective nor Cartesian space can

describe. Dan Graham, in Two- Way Mirror Cylinder inside Cube, a component of his

Rooftop Urban Park Project at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1991, see fig. 27

and pp. 86-87), recognizes the usefulness of geometry, plan organization, and sys­

temization ofthe structure while refusing to assign them a transcendent, defining role.

The environment, endlessly reflected, literally superimposes formlessness on the struc­

ture's architectural surfaces, easily overcoming the certitude ofthe structurally framed

view and the idealized abstraction ofthe circle and the square that create its plan, dis­

solving their Platonic forms in contingent perceptions. Similarly, the transparent sur­

faces, flickering video screens, and tilted volume ofthe Glass Video Gallery by Bernard

Tschumi (Groningen, the Netherlands, 1990, see fig. 14 and pp. 88-91) counteract

the ability of a structural grid and perspective vision to determine the overall image of

architecture. As Tschumi explains, "The appearance of permanence (buildings are

solid; they are made of steel, concrete, bricks, etc.) is increasingly challenged by the

immaterial representation of abstract systems (television and electronic images):'24

Ire 11: Ludwig Mies van dCT Rohe.

endhat House, Bmo, G"zechoslova­

1930. Exterior view of retractable dows.

While Feynman's writings apply specifically to the passing of light through mate­

rials, the D. E. Shaw and Company Offices by Steven Holl (New York City, 1991,

pp. 68-69) demonstrate a "slowing of light" as it reflects off opaque surfaces. Tn this

project, natural light enters through the building's windows, strikes screen walls

back-painted in various colors, and ricochets into the interiors, suffusing them with

reflected colored light recalling the soft, pervasive glow of James Turrell's sculptures.

The contrast between a classic modernist project and recent works illustrates

the difference between today's attitudes toward the architectural surface and earli­

er conceptions of transparent and translucent skins. While capable of creating a

remarkably complex surface, Mies van der Rohe intended in his Tugendhat House

(Brno, Czechoslovakia, 1929) to achieve the greatest transparency (fig. 11). To real­

aim, Mies employed the simplest kind of skin. The house was sheathed floor

to ceiling by the largest sheets of plate glass produced in Europe up to that

time. Ironically, given its expense, he hoped that the glazing would be

essentially nonmaterial; in fact, a mechanism allowed the glass walls to be

lowered into the basement, removing them altogether.

The projects presented here rarely display a skin that could be called

instead, they exploit the positive physical characteristics of

glass and other substances. As opposed to the fraction of an inch by which

the windows of the Tugendhat House separated its interior from the exteri­

or, these newer projects frequently have very complex sections comprising

a variety of materials, with discrete spaces between. This gives the surfaces

a depth that is sometimes slight, as in the tightly bound sheathing of the

Signal Box auf dem Wolf by Herzog and de Meuron (Basel, 1994, pp. 72-73),

and sometimes more pronounced, as in Peter Zumthor's Kunsthaus Bregenz

(Bregenz, Austria, pp. 74-77), currently under construction, whose interior

and exterior are separated by layers of translucent shingles, a passable air

space, and an interior wall. Such built-up sections increase emphasis on the

architectural surface and reveal a desire for greater complexity, visual and otherwise,

in the structure's skin. The reasons for multiple layers of material frequently include

reducing the transmission of heat and cold, but the aim of insulating the structure is

not solely a technical one. As does Poppaea's veil, layers of transparency define the

viewer's relationship to the world, creating not only insulation but a notable isolation­

removal from the continuum of space and experience implied by the nonmaterial sur­

faces of the Tugendhat House.

Architecture-though it may be read as a text with definite relationships to liter­

ature, philosophy, the fine arts, and so on-is a specific kind oftext with its own crit­

ical tools. The section, a conceptual device with little application outside architec­

ture, can be used to develop details, like the elements of a structure's surface, or

even the building as a whole. The section on page 78 of Harry Wolf's proposed ABN­

AMRO Head Office Building (Amsterdam, 1992) is analogous to details of the struc­

ture's curtain wall: each represents a volume of space suspended between glazed sur­

faces. Section views of the Leisure Studio (Espoo, Finland, 1992, pp. 82-85) by

Kaako, Laine, Liimatainen, and Tirkkonen, the Neues Museum extension (Berlin,

16 17

Rosalind Krauss has recently described a phenomenological reading of minimal­

ist sculpture, on the part of certain architecture critics, which effects a shift in mean­

ing that closely parallels the shift from form to surface evident in the projects pre­

sented here. She writes, "Far from having what we could call the fixed and enduring

centers of a kind of formulaic geometry, Minimalism produces the paradox of a cen­

terless, because shifting, geometry .... Because of this demonstrable attack on the

idea that works achieve their meaning by becoming manifestations or expressions of

a hidden center, Minimalism was read as lodging meaning in the surface of the

object, hence its interest in reflective materials, in exploiting the play of natural

light:'25 This interpretation of minimalist sculpture's tendency to shift the meaning of

the object from its form to its surface has broad implications for architecture. Jean

Nouvel expresses a similar idea when he describes the architecture of his Cartier

Foundation as one whose rules consist in "rendering superfluous the reading of solid

volumes in a poetry of haze and evanescence:'26

The position that Krauss describes need not be limited to a building wit)1 pol­

ished, reflective surfaces that record "actual, contingent particularities of its moment

of being experienced."27 For example, the "contingent particularities" of the Goetz

Collection do not lie solely in the subtle reflections of the birch trees surrounding it.

The project achieves a specific rather than universal character in its construction as

well: it "reflects" its site in the laminated birch veneer panels of the facade. And even

though the surfaces of the minimalist gymnasium by Tfiaki Abalos and Juan Herreros

(1991, pp. 98-101) are much less transparent or translucent, that project also resists

being perceived as an abstract formal exercise, insisting on its site-specificity, reflect­

ing the character of the walled Spanish hill town of Simancas.

In telling contrast to the ultimate importance given to architectural form in both

historicist postmodernism and deconstructivism, many of these projects exhibit a

remarkable lack of concern for, if not antipathy toward, formal considerations. In

fact, most of the projects could be described by a phrase no more complicated

than "rectangular volume:' Commenting on one of his recent projects, Koolhaas

explains the logic of this formal restraint: ''It is not a building that defines a clear

architectural identity; but a building that creates and triggers potential:'28 The ten­

sion between surface and form in contemporary architecture is not limited to rel­

atively simple forms: the overall silhouettes of Renzo Piano's Kansai International

Airport (Osaka, Japan, 1994, pp. 110-17), Frank Gehry's Frederick R. Weisman Art

Museum (Minneapolis, 1993, pp. 106-9), and Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners'

Waterloo International Terminal (London, 1994, pp. 92-98), for example, are far

too complex to be characterized as minimalist. Kansai Airport's sheer scale pre­

vents us from grasping its form, and the extent of the new Waterloo terminal can

only be seen from the air. Yet even when experiencing parts of Kansai Airport, we

realize that its silvery, undulating skin is more critical to its design than is its for­

mal composition; equally, the form of the Waterloo International Terminal reflects

peculiarities of the lot lines of existing rail yards rather than any preconceived for­

mal conceit. Tn both projects, the overall form is complex but indefinable, specific

but nonrepresentational.

•

None of the above projects, nor any of the less articulated ones previously con­

sidered, displays interest in "timeless, unchanging geometries;' and all of them com­

plement the diminished importance of overall form by an increased sensitivity to

the skin. And while the large projects may seem not just indifferent to but funda­

mentally estranged from the geometric rigors of perspectival construction, what

impresses the viewer of a project such as Toyo lto's Shimosuwa Municipal Museum

(Shimosuwa, Japan, 1993, pp. 118-23) is not that its form is difficult to grasp, which

it is, but that it simultaneously appears so precise. In effect, it suggests a new con­

ception of measure and order. Brunelleschi perceived an unbridgeable gap between

the measurable (the Baptistery) and the immeasurable (such as a cloud). Similarly,

Leonardo identified two kinds of visible bodies, "of which the first is without shape

or any distinct or definite extremities ... The second kind of visible bodies is that of

which the surface defines and distinguishes the shape:'29 Leonardo's distinction is

essentially false, however, determined by the inability of Renaissance mathematics to

describe complex surfaces. Fractal geometry has shown that there is no such funda­

mental distinction between the Baptistery and the cloud, only a difference in the

manner of calculating their physical characteristics.

The computer has diminished the realm of the immeasurable in architectural

design. In describing the uniquely shaped panels that compose the skin of the

Shimosuwa Museum, lto noted that without computer technology their cost, rela­

tive to that of standardized panels, would have been prohibitive. The use of extensive

computer modeling in the design of Kansai Airport (fig. 13) and Waterloo Terminal further demonstrates the extent to which technolo­

gy has overcome the "problem" of structure, once a

primary focus of design, whose "solution" subse­

quently defined, visually and otherwise, all other -kf:B;

--------- -­.--.---'

aspects of a project. This relativization of structure

can be seen in various ways in the projects pre­

sented here; for example, Nagisa Kidosaki, writing

T

Figure 13: Renzo Piano Building

Workshop, Japan_ Kansai Tnternational

Airport, Osaka. 1994. Diagram showing

top-bottom chord axial forces under

vertical loading

about the Shimosuwa Museum, explains: "Thin

membranes meant a thin structural system:'30

The use of sophisticated computer modeling is

only one sign of the impact of technology on the architectural surface. The incorpo­

ration of electronic media into contemporary structures may result in the transfor­

mation of a building'S skin, which literally becomes a screen for projection in Herzog

and de Meuron's 1993 Olivetti Bank project (see fig. 15). A more architectonic syn­

thesis of the electronic media can be seen in those projects in which electronic tech­

nology is not simply grafted to the structure but transformed into material and spa­

tial qualities. The flattening of objects and activities projected onto translucent

glazing gives a facade or interior surface the aura of a flickering electronic screen. On

a small scale, this phenomenon is evident in the Thanhauser and Esterson gymnasi­

um, where the athletes' silhouettes are projected onto the surfaces of dressing room

cubicles (each cubicle has splayed walls, as if to suggest projection). On a larger

scale, the farmhouses and elements of the natural landscape outside lto's ITM

18 19

Building collapse, in effect, as they are projected onto the surface glazing of the

triple-height atrium. Tn Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's portable translucent set for

the play The World Upside Down (Amsterdam and New York, 1990-91, pp. 104-5),

projections actually became part of the performance as actors' sil­

houettes were cast onto screens and magnified by manipulation of

the lighting. Jacques Herzog writes of "these surfaces for projection,

these levels of overlapping, the almost-identity of architecture."31

Despite the ambiguous, equivocal, and at times even erotic

undertones of many of the projects discussed here, it would be

incorrect to assign them to a world of smoke and mirrors, where all

is illusion, indecipherable and unattainable. Rather, they realign

or rethink a nexus of ideas that has fueled much of architectural

development since the Renaissance: perspectival vision, Cartesian

space, and, by inference, the structural grid. Inherent in the works

presented here, particularly Joel Sanders's studied Kyle Residence

project (1991, pp. 124-25), is the possibility of a position that

includes the certitude of objective vision and the equivocal nature of

the gaze; these works recognize the efficacy and the utility of per­

spectival construction without subordinating all else to its language

of measure and order. The fusion of the two might be best under­

stood in the designers' attitude toward structure, for centuries the

most evident expression of the theoretical coincidence of perspec­

tival vision and Cartesian thinking. Many of these projects share a

common approach to relationship between the structure and

the skin: the structural members, rather than framing and there­

fore defining the point of view, are lapped over by single and dou­

ble layers of translucent sheathing, as in the interior partitions of

the Cartier Foundation, the clerestory of the Goetz Collection, and

Annette Gigon and Mike Guyer's Kirchner Museum Davos (Davos,

Switzerland, 1992, pp. 126-29). The structure, while providing

support in a straightforward manner, has a diminished potential to

ure 14: Bernard Tschumi. ass Video GaTtery, Groningen,

e Netherlands. 1990. Exploded

'onometric diagram

determine the appearance of the building. Other projects here vir­

tually erase the boundary between support and surface: the Glass Video Gallery

makes no material distinction between the glass ribs that give it stability and the

glass sheathing that encloses the space (fig. 14). The monocoque design of the

Phoenix Art Museum Sculpture Pavilion by Williams and Tsien (Phoenix, Arizona,

pp. 130-31) similarly merges structure and sheathing. The Pavilion's translucent

resin panels, ranging from one-half to one inch thick and connected only with stain­

less steel clips, are self-supporting and stabilizing.

It could be argued that these self-effacing but critical details relativize the role of

the structure in a more self-confident way than deconstructivist ploys such as tilted

columns, destabilized surfaces, and structural redundancies, which, though meant to

undermine the role of structure, frequently achieve the opposite: the specter of the

displaced rises up endlessly to haunt the architecture. More fundamentally, such

detailing can be unambiguous about creating ambiguity.

Calvino expresses this idea well: "Lightness for me goes with

precision and determination, not vagueness and the haphaz­

ard:'32In "Lightness;' one of Calvino's Six Memos for the

Next Millennium, he writes, "T look to science to nourish my

visions in which all heaviness disappears"; and further, "the

iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weight­

less bits:'33 Calvino reminds us that just as the current con­

ception of transparency is distant from that held by early

modern rationalists, these contemporary expressions of

Figure 15: Jacques Herzog and Pierre lightness are distinct from earlier conceptions of lightweight architecture: they imply de Meuron. Olivetti Bank Project. 1993

a seeming weightlessness rather than a calculation of relative weight. 34 Calvino's bal­ (prototype)

ance between iron machines and weightless bits is also seen in Starobinski's pre­

scription for the "reflexive gaze;' which incorporates the wisdom associated with

vision, yet "trusts in the senses and in the world the senses revea!:'35

The subject ofStarobinski and Calvino is literature, but their observations have

numerous implications for understanding the aesthetics of the architecture pre­

sented here, as well as its broader cultural context. 36 Calvino refers to Guido

Cavalcanti as a poet of "lightness;' which he defines as follows: "(1) it is to the high­

est degree light; (2) it is in motion; (3) it is a vector of information:'37 Tto's Tower of

the Winds (Yokohama, 1986-95, pp. 132-33) practically begs to be analyzed in

these terms. Relatively nondescript in daylight, the structure was brought to life at

night by thousands of computer-controlled light sources whose constantly changing

patterns responded to sounds and wind. Tn the architect's words, "The intention

was to extract the flow of air (wind) and noise (sound) from the general flow of

things in the environment of the project and to transform them into light signals,

that is, visual information. Simply put, it was an attempt to convert the environ­

ment into information:'38

Tt is not surprising that the pervasive presence in contemporary culture of film,

television, video, and computer screens, representing a unique sen­

sibility of light, movement, and information, should find its way into

architecture. Koolhaas's composition for the Karlsruhe Zentrum fUr

Kunst and Medientechnologie is perhaps the most provocative con­

figuration of the electronic screen and the architectural facade, but

the proposed display of financial quotations on the facade of Herzog

and de Meuron's Olivetti Bank project is no less explicit and equally

convincing, given its program (fig. 15). Among built projects, Tto's

Egg of the Winds (fig. 16), Tschumi's Glass Video Gallery, and

Mehrdad Yazdani's CineMania Theatre (1994, pp. 102-3) represent

Figure 16: Toyo Ito. Egg ofthe Winds, more restrained uses of electronic imagery but still demonstrate the ability of the Tokyo. 1991

architectural object to be transformed by the dull glow and flickering image of the

electronic media. The effect, as Tto has described it, is to render urban space as a

"phenomenal city of lights, sounds, and images ... superimposed on the tangible

urban space of buildings and civil engineering works:'39

20 21

igure 17: Jan Vermeer. Woman ith a Pearl Necklace. C. /662-65. 'it on canyas, 21 11lt6 x 17 % in.

x 45cm). Staatliche Museen

Berlin-Preullischer Kulturbesitz emiildegalerie

The architects' interest in electronic media is neither an expression of techno­

logical fantasy nor simply a fascination with the aesthetic allure of low-voltage lumi­

nescence. It is rooted in the ability of these electronic modes of communication to

portray the immediacy and the poignant transience of contemporary life. Their

works bring to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein's observation, "It seems as though there is

nothing intangible about the chair or the table, but there is about the fleeting human

experience."40 Dennis Adams's installation Bus Shelter TV (Munster, Germany, 1987,

pp. 134-35) narrows the gap between the tangible and the intangible. Adams trans­

forms an ordinary bus shelter into the setting for an urban drama in which com­

muters find themselves both observers and observed. Interposed between enlarged

backlit transparencies, they find their own image projected and reflected by a high­ ly manipulative visual environment.

The many images here that portray the architecture at night, lit from within, sug­

gest that Ito is not alone in seeking an architecture that "is to the highest degree

light:' Tn Zaha Hadid's 1994 proposal for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, the nocturnal

view is not simply the inverse of the building's daylight appearance. Indeed, the draw­

ings prepared for the competition indicate that the design was conceived as a night­

time phenomenon. Floor Plan, an installation by Melissa Gould (Linz, Austria, 1991,

pp. 136-37), equally depends on darkness, literally and metaphorically, to convey

its message. The project consisted of a nearly full-scale outline of the plan of a Berlin

synagogue destroyed during the Nazi terror. The ghost building was evoked by lights

shallow trenches, which traced the configuration of the synagogue's walls and

columns. Photographs document the poignant dramatic character of the project: we

see eerily lit faces of visitors moving through the installation. More tragically, the

work can disappear at the flick of a switch. Gould's project demonstrates unequivo­ cally that "lightness" should not be confused with frivolity.

The current fascination with the architecture of lightness in many ways depends

on recent technological developments. It also manifests a persistent theme in

Western culture. Describing his proposed ABN-AMRO Head Office Building, Harry

Wolf refers to the "longstanding concern for light in the Netherlands; that is, the

association of luminosity, precision, and probity in all matters:' However, notwith­

standing the philosophical associations of light with the Enlightenment, illumination,

and so on, the attempt to magnify the presence of natural light in northern European

projects is primarily a response to the immediate setting-also a longstanding con­

cern. Wolf recalls "Vermeer's preoccupation with subtle modulations of light through

a window."41 Jan Vermeer's emphasis on ambient light is, among other things, an

attempt to magnify its diminished presence in northern latitudes (fig. n); a similar

motive led to the gilding of architectural features, from the cupolas of New Haven's

churches and the Goldene Dachel of Munich's imperial residence to the reflective

sheathing of Gehry's Weisman Art Museum. The Kirchner Museum's principal gal­

leries are lit by a clerestory level, capturing light from all directions in a plenum and

diffusing it through the galleries' frosted glass ceilings. This sensitivity to low levels of

natural light also may be a response to the flattening of the shadowless landscape, particularly during the winter months.

Herzog usefully observes: ULe Corbusier ... wrote, 'Architecture is the scientific,

correct, and wonderful game of volumes assembled under light: What, however, if

architecture is not a game at all, especially not a scientific and correct one and if

the light is often clouded over, diffuse, not so radiant as it is in the ideal southern

landscape?,,42 Holl's Helsinki Museum of Contemporary Art (under construction,

pp. 138-43) traps this diffuse northern light within its section in order to introduce

both directly and by reflection, into the lower parts of the building-suggesting,

perhaps, an architectural antithesis of Le Corbusier's brise-solei/, a shield from Medi­

terranean sunlight. Oriented to maximize exposure to the sun, which is low on the

horizon most of the year, the museum incorporates a reflecting pool as an extension

of nearby Toolo Bay. In Holl's words, "The horizontal light of northern latitudes is

enhanced by a waterscape that would serve as an urban mirror, thereby linking the

new museum to Helsinki's Toolo heart, which on a clear day, in [Alvar] Aalto's words,

'extends to Lapland:"43

In climates far removed from the idealized, sun-filled landscape of the Mediter­

ranean, which Le Corbusier encountered in his youthful voyage en Orient, the long­

ing for light may conflict with another more recent cultural concern. The past two

decades have seen an increasing consciousness of architecture's environmental impli­

cations, particularly the energy consumption of buildings. Two approaches, both of

which avoid or minimize mechanical heating and cooling systems dependent on fuel

consumption, attempt to balance environmental concerns with the widespread use of

glass and other thermally inefficient materials.

The first approach is essentially passive, in the technical sense of employing non­

mechanical systems to heat and cool structures and often electing to forgo optimal

climate control. Williams and Tsien's Phoenix Art Museum Sculpture Pavilion is to

have no mechanical air-conditioning system; instead, it will employ a low-technolo­

gy cooling device based on commonsense thermodynamics. Approximately twenty

feet above the viewing area, scores of nozzles emit a fine mist of cool water, which

evaporates before reaching ground level. The heat exchange that occurs during the

evaporation process lowers the air temperature by ten to twenty degrees, and this

heavier air then descends to cool visitors in the open pavilion. The simple principles

behind this low-technology approach are equally useful in the colder climate of

Munich, where the Goetz Collection is enclosed by a double layer of glass that not

only contributes to the "slowing" of light but acts as a sort of a duct, like a chimney.

As heat accumulates in the lower floor (which is below grade and therefore has a

more stable temperature), it escapes into the space between the layers of glass and

rises to the upper floor, providing a secondary source of heat. The Leisure Studio and

Glass Video Gallery reject systems requiring high energy consumption to compensate

for low thermal efficiency; users must simply accept constraints imposed by the cli­

mate: diminished comfort or restricted use when temperatures reach seasonal

extremes. This attitude should not be perceived as a kind of obliviousness to the real­

ity of climatic conditions but as a value judgment: a conscious decision reflecting a

deep-rooted preference for the enhancement of available light, for one particular

kind of comfort instead of another.

22 23

igure 18: Sir Norman Foster and

'artners. Business Promotion Center.

'uisburg, Germany. 1993. Axonometric

utaway of layered glass cladding and "oor slab

The second approach uses higher technology to achieve energy efficien­

cy. Just as the computer has rendered the problem of structure less funda­

mental, limitations on the efficiency of mechanical heating and cooling are

being overcome by technological advancements. Norman Foster's Business

Promotion Center (Duisburg, Germany, 1993, pp. 144-47) is a building with

an insulated glass facade wrapped in another layer of glass (fig. 18). A con­

tinuous air space between the two layers rises from the ground to the top of

the structure. Large buildings, in contrast to smaller ones such as the Goetz

Collection, absorb too much heat. To control heat intake, the air space in the

Duisburg project has translucent louvers that can admit light but deflect

heat, which can then be exhausted upward before entering the interior glaz­

ing. Within this system, there is an attempt to address micro environmental

differences between interior spaces. Even though the louvers adjust them­

selves automatically to the position of the sun, office workers can readjust

them. Occupants may also open windows in the inner glazing to ventilate

offices from the air moving through the twenty-centimeter gap between the inner and outer glazing.

Just as lightness offers a way to understand much of contemporary archi­

tecture in terms other than formal ones, cultural concerns with light and the

environment are not limited to glass structures. The shimmering skin of

metal tiles that covers Kansai Airport not only evokes the architect's stated

goal of "lightness;' but acts as a huge umbrella, protecting the structure from

which become translucent when a preset thermal threshold is reached:'44 The former,

used in sunglasses, is not yet sold for architectural use, but the latter, according to the

authors, will become more widely available in the near future. A third type of smart

glazings, called electrochromic, consists of multilayer assemblies through which a low­

voltage electric current can be passed, causing ions to move to the outer layer where

they may reflect heat-producing ultraviolet light but transmit visible wavelengths.

To speak of the technological attitudes of the projects discussed here as cultural

phenomena requires further scrutiny, particularly given the prominence of glass

structures over the course of this century. Glass architecture is not, however, unique

to our time; a centuries-long fascination with it is evident in Jewish, Arabic, and

European literature and mythology. As the architectural historian Rosemarie Haag

Bletter has demonstrated, the "glass dream" that inspired these cultures has ancient

roots, traceable to the biblical accounts of King Solomon's temple having reflective

floors made of gold. 45 The glass dream was sustained through the Mozarabic culture

of medieval Spain, principally in literary form, but it also found built expression in

small metaphorical structures such as garden pavilions. "Because an actual glass or

crystal palace was not technically feasible, the semblance of such a building was

attained through allusion: water and light were used to suggest a dissolution of solid

materials into a fleeting vision of disembodied, mobile architecture:'46 In the Gothic

period, the glass dream found greater expression in built form, in the soaring cathe­

drals with their expansive walls of colored glass, as well as in literary sources, par­

ticularly the legends of the Holy Grail. Tn Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifa1, the

sought-for Grail is symbolized by a glowing crystal hidden in a cave. The association

between the image of a crystal or jewel and glass architecture is enduring. Zaha

Hadid, describing her design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House, refers to the overall

organization as an "inverted necklace" that strings together the various service ele­

ments, which she calls the "jewels" of the program. 47 Similarly, Harry Wolf speaks of

his attempts to "create a heightened sense of transparency, just as light reflected and

refracted in a gem seems more compelling and brilliant:'48

This literary and architectural motive continued through the Renaissance, emerg­

ing as a central theme of Francesco Colonna's widely read Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

of 1499. An expression of the romantic aspect of the Renaissance fascination with the

ruins of classical antiquity, it invokes images of structures with transparent alabaster

walls and floors of highly polished obsidian, so mirrorlike that viewers thought they

were walking through the reflected sky. While the Enlightenment was characterized

by a fascination with light and the scientific investigation of optics, its architectural

expressions were not as poetic. The Crystal Palace might seem equally rationalist,

though it is hard for us to imagine the impact of this first extensively glazed large struc­

ture, envisioned as the stage for a global event, and the spectacle created by its con­

struction and dismantling. Furthermore, the glass fountain at its crossing was an under­

stated but direct reference to the fantastic Mozarabic structures described by Bletter .49

As Bletter has demonstrated, the association of crystalline architecture with the

transcendent (and its counterpart, the association of opaque materials with the pro­

fane) is central to the glass dream in all of its manifestations. The expressionist

heat gain as well as rain. The building's undulating wave shape is, borrowing

Calvino's words, "to the highest degree light;' but it also interestingly embodies his

emphasis on movement. Its shape expresses the flow of passengers across the struc­

ture from the "landside" to the "airside;' as they move from check-in to departure,

and it is also calculated to channel streams of air. The voluptuous interior ceiling

carries ribbonlike channels, their shape derived from computer models of the flow of

air, which guide heated and cooled air through the length ofthe building without the use of enclosed air ducts.

Such applications of innovative solutions to environmental problems bespeak a

confidence in technology that has become discredited in some quarters. But the dis­

missal of a technological approach as evidence of an unjustified faith in the myth of

progress is refuted by the successes of Foster, Piano, Peter Rice, and many other

architects and engineers. Much of their research seeks to justify the ongoing use of

glazed structures, so it is not surprising that their attention often focuses on glazing

materials. While this research, like that devoted to conversion of solar energy, has

limited application today, new glazing materials are on the edge of wide use.

"Superwindows" with various coatings and gas-filled cavities have already proven to

have better insulation properties than today's thermally efficient opaque materials.

Perhaps more intriguing than this new class of high-performance but essentially

static systems are what Stephen Selkowitz and Stephen LaSourd call "smart" glazings,

which react to changing conditions. 'These include "photo chromic glass, which

reversibly changes optical density when exposed to light;' and "thermo chromic glazings,

24 25

movement in the twentieth century added to the spirituality, fantasy,

transformation, and utopianism with which glass architecture had

historically been identified. In the aftermath ofthe First World War,

expressionists such as architect Bruno Taut were seeking not only

new forms but a new society. Bletter notes, "The crystalline glass

house [fig. 19] ... concretizes for Taut the kind of unstructured soci­

ety he envisions. Class is here no longer the carrier of spiritual or

personal transformation but of a political metamorphosis:'::;o

In an essay published ten years ago, K. Michael Hays proposes

the possibility of a "critical architecture" that is perceived as a cul­

tural phenomenon, as a readable text, without forgetting that it is a

particular kind of text with specific references to its own history, "a

Figure 19: Bruno Taut. Glass

Pavilion. Cologne. 1914 (demolished)

igure 20: Paul Nelson. Model of

'uspcnded House. Project. 1938. The

'useum of Modern Art. New York. Gift if the Advisory Committee

critical architecture that claims for itself a place between the efficient

representation of preexisting cultural values and the wholly detached autonomy of an

abstract formal system:'51 If the architecture presented here can claim to occupy

such a position, one might ask, Where is that place? Of what exactly is this contem­ porary architecture critical?

First and foremost, it is a critique of the canonical history of modern architec­

ture. The historian Reyner Banham writes: "The official history of the Modern

Movement, as laid out in the late Twenties and codified in the Thirties, is a view

through the marrow-hole of a dry bone ... The choice of a skeletal history of the

movement with all the Futurists, Romantics, Expressionists, Elementarists and pure

aesthetes omitted, though it is most fully expressed in [Siegfried] Ciedion's Bauen in

Frankreich, is not to be laid to Ciedion's charge, for it was the choice of the move­

ment as a whole. Quite suddenly modern architects decided to cut off half their grandparents without a farthing:'::;2

The modern past is reconfigured by many of the projects discussed here in tha~ they offer a chance to reconsider the reputations of certain figures whose work was

largely ignored in the postwar period. Fritz Neumeyer Uses terms strikingly similar

to Starobinski's when describing Otto Wagner's 1904-6 Postal Savings Bank in

Vienna: "Like the then floating garment that clothes the female body in ancient Creek

sculpture, revealing as much beauty as it conceals, Wagner's treatment of the

structure and construction exploits a similar kind of delicate, sensuous play that was

probably only evident to a connoisseur of a certain age and experience. Exactly

this principle gives the interior of the [Postal Savings Bank] its quality of silk-like

transparency. The glass veil

is lifted up on iron stilts that

carefully cut into its skin and

gently disappear :'53

Paul Nelson's "technosur­

realist"54 Suspended House

(fig. 20), a glazed volume with

free-floating forms suspended

within, provides a model for a

Figure 21: Manfred and Laurids Ortner. The Museum of Modern Art. Museumsquartier Vienna. Competition

proposal. 1990. Diagram ofcomponent

structures

Pigure 22: Prank Lloyd Wright. S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc. Research Laboratory Tower, Racine, WIsconsin.

1943-50. Exterior

presences" could equally be applied to Chareau's masterwork or

Johnson Research Laboratory Tower (fig. 22) by Frank Lloyd Wright, the great

American architect whose contribution to modern architecture was frequently mar­

ginalized by European historians.

Oscar Nitzchke's seminal project of 1935, La Maison de la Publicite (fig. 23), was

similarly neglected by modern historians, whose interests

were more focused on the machine metaphor than on

populist expressions of modern culture such as cinema

and advertising. 58 Yet the project offers an early example

of the current fascination with electronic media and the

nocturnal transformation of architecture. Recalling

Calvino's triad of light, movement, and information,

Nitzchke's project assumes a prophetic aura. Louis Kahn's

decision to use glass for its specific material qualities in

his projected Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs

(1966-72), instead of regarding it as a nonmaterial, is

unusual for its time, and dECOi's 1991 Another Class

House (fig. 24) is a recent project that transforms its inspi­

ration, Philip Johnson's 1949 Class House, by emphasizing

glass'S materiality, which Johnson implicitly denied.

In postmodernism's caricature (ironically based large­

lyon Ciedion) of modern history, the wholesale devaluation of buildings such as

Cordon Bunshaft's 1963 Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale

University (fig. 25) has further obscured the roots of a number of works presented

here. The Beinecke's section within a section-an outer layer of translucent alabaster

enclosing a glazed, climate-controlled rare books library - is revived in various ways

number of projects, from Sejima's Women's Dormitory to Maki's

Congress Center project and Manfred and Laurids Ortner's pro­

posed Museum of Modern Art for Vienna's Museum Quarter

(1990, fig. 21 and pp. 148-51). Describing his unbuilt project of

1935, Nelson said, "Suspension in space ... heightens the sense

of isolation from the outside world:'::;::;

The Maison de Verre by Pierre Chareau, largely ignored by

modern historians until the publication of Kenneth Frampton's

monograph on Chareau in 1969, looms large in any discussion of

lightness. 56 Recognized in its time as having transcended the then

ossifying parameters of the International Style, it was referred to

as having a "cinematographic sense of space;' a description that

invokes much of the imagery employed here to describe contem­

porary architectural synergy. 57 In its visual complexity, the coy­

ness with which it reveals its interior space, and its willful subor­

dination of structural clarity, the facade of the Maison de Verre

could serve as a precis for Starobinski's notion of the gaze as a

reflexive act. Vidler's description of facades that reveal "shadowy

26

27

in Peter Zumthor's Kunsthaus Bregenz, David Chipperfield's pro­

posed extension of the Neues Museum in Berlin (fig. 26), and the

Herzog and de Meuron Greek Orthodox Church project.

Besides representing an attempt to recapture lost figures in mod­

ern architectural history, the projects here also reflect the current

reevaluation ofthe canonical masters. As a result of the historical par­

ody of "glass boxes" offered by postmodern critics, a new generation

is rediscovering an architecture of the not so recent past. Charles

Jencks's dismissal of the work of Mies van der Rohe exemplifies post­

modernist criticism: "For the general aspect of an architecture creat­

ed around one (or a few) simplified values, I wiU use the term univa­

lence. No doubt in terms of expression the architecture of Mies van

der Rohe and his followers is the most univalent formal system we

have, because it makes use offew materials and a single, right-angled

geometry:'59 Detlef Mertins's writings are among recent, less hostile

appraisals: "Could it be that this seemingly familiar architecture is

still in many ways unknown, and that the monolithic Miesian edifice refracts the light

of interpretation, mUltiplying its potential implications for contemporary architec­

tural practices?"60 Mertins could well be speaking of Koolhaas's Two Patio Villas

(Rotterdam, 1988, pp. 152-55), in which the use of clear, frosted, green-tinted, and

armored glass recalls not the nonmaterial of the Tugendhat House but the rich sur­

faces and the mUltiplicity of perceptions evident in Mies's Barcelona Pavilion.

Although the expressionists were rejected by rationalist architects such as

Hilberseimer and effectively written out of the history of modern architecture by

Giedion and others, the influence of Taut and his followers, referred to as the Glass

Chain, is evident in the work of a number of canonical modern masters, including

Mies's glass skyscrapers of about 1920. Walter Gropius, in his manifesto for the

Bauhaus, was influenced by Taut's expressionist utopianism: "Together let us desire,

conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture

and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven

from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith!'61

Frampton, Banham, and others have noted that standard modern histories frequent­

•

Figure 23: Oscar Nitzchke.

Maison de la PubliciUi, Paris. 1934-36.

Perspective, Gouache and photo­

montage, 28 x 20 1/2'. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Gift of Lily Auchincloss, Barbara

Jakobson, and Walter Randel

Figure 24: dECOi. Another

Class House. Competition proposal, 1991. Axonometric

ly underestimate the important rela­

tionships between what have come to

be perceived as irreconcilably opposed tendencies.

The success of Rowe and Slutzky in

awakening a generation of American,

and to a lesser extent European, archi­

tects from the "glass dream" over the

course of four decades depended on

establishing a more narrow dialectic

than the fundamental one between

transparency and opacity described by

1;#111'" 25: Gordon Bunshaft­ 'kidmore, Owings & Merrill. Beinecke /I,,,,,. Book and Manuscript Library, Yale f tliVf~rsity. New Haven. Connecticut.

IfJrd. Interior view

Figure 26: David Chipperfield.

Nelles Museum Extension, Berlin.

Competition proposal, 1994.

Computer-generated light study

ofinterior of the Temple Hall

Bletter. Given Rowe's nostalgia for the classical facade and his antipathy

toward technological imagery, that longstanding relationship was enor­

mously inconvenient. Rowe and Slutzky inverted the dichotomy by

equating the literal transparency of glass structures with materiality and

the phenomenal transparency of Le Corbusier with the higher functions

of intellectual abstraction: "A basic distinction must perhaps be estab­

lished. Transparency may be an inherent quality of substance-as in a

wire mesh or glass curtain wall, or it may be an inherent quality of orga­

nization ... a phenomenal or seeming transparency:'62

If much of the architecture herein can be seen as a critical response

to Giedion and the "room of shadowless light" that he helped canonize,

it also represents a critique of the formalism espoused by Rowe in the

course of devaluing glass architecture. The facades seen here express

not only a post-Rovian sense of transparency but the rejection of the

frontally viewed classical facade and its "structure of exclusion;' its "set of refusals."

While there is a common interest in maintaining a level of ambiguity, in limiting the

overreaching certitude of architectural expression, this recent architecture goes

beyond evoking the "equivocal emotions" that Rowe and Slutzky found in the pres­

ence of architectural form, investigating the possibility of rethinking, and investing

with meaning, the architectural skin. As membranes, screens, and filters, the sur­

faces ofthis architecture establish a vertigo of delay, blockage, and slowness, upend­

ing the "vertigo of acceleration" that has dominated architectural design since the

invention of perspectival drawing.

In a contemporary context, the critique of Rowe's Epicureanism represented by

the projects here need not be taken as endorsement of a new sachlich architecture

of shadowless light, an expression of the renewed puritanism of our time. Just the

opposite: this recent architecture, trusting in "the senses and in the world the sens­

es reveal," can be described as beautiful a word infrequently heard in architectur­

al debates. Indeed, academic rationalists enjoyed such success in establishing the

basis for architectural discussions that architects have been called "secret agents for

beauty:' As a group, the projects here have a compelling visual attraction, undimin­

ished by close reflection, that implicitly criticizes Hilberseimer's rejection of the aes­

thetic dimension. They likewise reject the strictures of postmodernism, which have

alternated between invoking, as inspirations for architecture, a suffocating suprema­

cy of historical form and arid philosophical speculation. Of the latter Koolhaas

writes, "Our amalgamated wisdom can be caricatured: according to Derrida we can­

not be Whole, according to Baudrillard we cannot be Real, according to Virilio we

cannot be There-inconvenient repertoire for a profession helplessly about being

Whole, Real, and There:'63

Tn Tony Kushner's play Angels in America, part two opens with Aleksii Ante­

dilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, the World's Oldest Living Bolshevik, haranguing the

audience: "What System of Thought have these Reformers to present to this mad

swirling planetary disorganization, to the Inevident Welter of fact, event, phenome­

non, calamity?"64 Prelapsarianov'-s taunts remind us that the already muddied waters

28 29

Figure 27: Dan Graham. Two-Way

Mirror Cylinder inside Cube. 199 f. The Rooftop Urban Park Project. Diu

Center for the Arts, New York City

of the postmodern debate, played out over the last thirty years, are further roiled by

the approaching millennium, with its own set of critical references. Even so, without

claiming an overreaching system ofthought, it is possible to see in the current archi­

tectural synergy further evidence of a renewed adherence to the spirit of the centu­

ry, a spirit that most often expressed itself as one of invention and idealism. Tn

response to the "inconvenient repertoire" of poststructuralism, Koolhaas imagines a

"potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective,

reclaim maximum possibility."65

Beyond his own work, Koolhaas's words resonate in projects at vastly different

scales, though, as is often the case, they can be most distinctly seen in smaller pro­

jects, where simpler programs allow for more direct expression. Despite its modest

scale, the Leisure Studio eloquently fits Hays's definition of a critical architecture, but

it is also an expression of an idealism too easily dismissed in a cynical age. Designed

by an architectural collaborative as a contre-projet in response to an official housing

exhibition, it is currently used as an informal meeting place

where artists and architects socialize and exchange ideas. Tn con­

trast to standard professional practice, the structure was built

and paid for by the architects themselves. Tod Williams and Billie

Tsien's mobile, translucent stage set evokes the choreographer's

theme of societal transformation, and in doing so reminds us that

the realm of the aesthetic has social dimensions. Graham's Two­

Way Mirror Cylinder inside Cube, a work which clearly occupies

a position "in between," consciously refers to the history of glass

architecture. (Bletter's commentary on expressionist design

could well be applied to it: "Those very aspects ... that appear on

first glance to be its most revolutionary ones-transparency,

instability, and flexibility-on closer examination turn out to be

its most richly traditional features:'66) But Graham's work, too, transcends a purely

aesthetic approach. By incorporating it into his Rooftop Urban Park Project, which he

characterizes as a "utopian presence" in the city, he elevates the work from the sta­

tus of mere formal abstraction (fig. 27). His contemporary urban park - which, like

its traditional counterparts, seeks to reintegrate alienated city dwellers with their

environment while providing a contemplative place apart-restores the aesthetic

dimension of the glass dream and points toward the idealism that sustained it.

Notes

I would like to thank Kenneth Frampton, Michael

Hays, Rem Koolhaas, Guy Nordenson, Joan

Ockman, Jean Starobinski, Bernard Tschumi, and

Kirk Varnedoe for their suggestions and comments.

I also thank Christopher Lyon for his dedication and

insights during the editorial process, and Pierre

Adler, Bevin Howard, Lucy Maulsby, Vera

Neukirchen, and Heather Urban for research and

translation assistance.

1. Ludwig Hilberseimer, "Glasarchitektur;' Die

Form 4 (1929): 522. Translated by Vera

Neukirchen.

2. Ibid., 521.

3. Jean Starobinski, "Poppaea's Veil; in The

Living Eye (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1989), 1.

4. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel

de Montaigne, trans. and ed. M. A. Screech

(London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1991), 697.

The passage continues: "Why do women now cover

up those beauties-right down below their heels­

which every woman wants to display and every man

wants to see? Why do they clothe with so many

obstacles, layer upon layer, those parts which are

the principal seat of our desires-and of theirs?

And what use are those defence-works with which

our women have started to arm their thighs, if not

to entrap our desires and to attract us by keeping

us at a distance 1"

5. Starobinski, "Poppaea's Veil:' 1-2.

6. Ibid., 2.

7. See note 4.

8. Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, "Toyo Ito: An Opaque

'Transparency;" in JA Library 2, special issue of The

Japan Architect (Summer 1993): 154.

9. Colin Rowe and Robe[t Slutzky,

"Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal; in Rowe,

The Mathematics of the Tdeal Villa and Other

Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), 171.

10. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny:

Essays in the Modern Un homely (Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1992), 221.

11. Rowe and Slutzky, ''Transparency," 163-64.

12. In a recent communication with the author,

the architectural historian Joan Ockman summa­

rized the elements of phenomenal transparency as

"free play in the object, the extension of 'aesthetic

time; and oscillating readings or meanings that are

ultimately unresolvable: Her description clearly

shows that a foundation of Gestalt psychology,

provided by her husband Robert Slutzky, support­

ed the concept of phenomenal transparency.

13. Rowe and Slutzky, "Transparency:' 171.

14. Kenneth Frampton, "Pierre Chareau, an

Eclectic Architect:' in Marc Vellay and Frampton,

Pierre Chareau, Architect and Craftsman,

1883-1950 (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 243.

15. Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp, or The

Castle of Purity, trans. D. Gardner (London: Cape

Goliard Press, 1970), 1-2. I am indebted to Peter

Eisenman for suggesting that I look at Paz's discus­

sion of transparency.

16. Frampton, "Pierre Chareau, an Eclectic

Architect," 242.

17. Ibid.

18. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL

(New York: Monacelli Press, 1995 [prepublication

copy]), 654.

19. Rowe and Slutzky, "Transparency; 166.

20. Richard P. Feynman, QED: The Strange

Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1985), 69. I thank Guy Nordenson

for suggesting Feynman's writings.

21. Ibid., 109.

22. Hubert Damisch, TMorie du nuage (Paris:

Editions du Seuil, 1972), 170. Translated by Pierre

Adler. lowe to Rosalind Krauss my introduction to

Damisch's book, to which she refers in the essay

cited in note 25.

23. Ibid.

24. Bernard Tschumi, "Groningen, Glass Video

Gallery, 1990; in Event-Cities (Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1994), 559.

25. Krauss, "Minimalism: The Grid, The/Cloud/,

and the Detail," in Detlef Mertins, ed., The

Presence of Mies (Princeton: Princeton Archi­

tectural Press, 1994), 133-34.

26. Jean Nouvel, "The Cartier Building; archi­

teet's statement, n.d.

27. Krauss, "Minimalism;' 133.

28. Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 126"

29. Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of

Leonardo da Vinci, an., trans., and intra.

E. MacCul'dy (New York: George Braziller, 1939),

986-87.

30. Nagisa Kidosaki, "Shimosuwa Municipal

Museum," in JA Library 2, special issue of The

Japan Architect (Summer 1993): 27.

31. Jacques Herzog, architect's statement, n.d.

32. Italo Calvino, "Lightness," in Six Memos for

30 31

the Next Millennium (New York: Vintage

International, 1993), 16.

33. Ibid., 8.

34. The linguistic relationship between lightness

and lightweight exists principally in English.

35. Starobinski, "Poppaea's Veil:' 6.

36. For further analysis of Calvino and lightness

in architecture, see Cynthia Davidson and John

Rajchman, eds., Any Magazine 5 (March/April

1994).

37. Calvino, "Lightness:' 13.

38. Toyo Ito, "A Garden of Microchips: The

Architectural Image ofthe Microelectronic Age:' in

JA Libnuy 2, special issue of The Japan Architect

(Summer 1993): 11-13.

39. Ibid., 11.

40. Quoted in Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein:

The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin Books,

1990),355. The passage is from notes taken by

Rush Rhees of Wittgenstein's 1936 lecture ,vrhe

Language of Sense Data and Private Experience -\."

41. Harry Wolf, "ABN-AMRO Head Office

Building:' architect's statement, n.d.

42. Jacques Herzog, "The Hidden Geometry of

Nature:' Quaderns, no. 181-82 (1989): 104.

43. Steven Holl, "Museum of Contemporary Art,

Helsinki," architect's statement, n.d.

44. Stephen Selkowitz and Stephen LaSourd,

"Amazing Glass," ProgT'essive ArchitectuT'e 6 (June

1994), 109.

45. Rosemarie Haag Bletter, "The Interpretation

of the Glass Dream - Expressionist Architecture

and the History of the Crystal Metaphor:' Journal

of the Society of Architectural Historians 40, no.l

(March 1981): 20.

46. Bletter, "Glass Dream," 25.

47. Zaha Hadid, "Cardiff Bay Opera House

Architectural Competition;' architect's statement,

n.d.

48. Wolf, "ABN-AMRO Head Office Building:'

49. Prince Albert Saxe-Coburg, the royal

patron of the Crystal Palace, commissioned Edward

Lorenzo Percy to design a centerpiece based on

literary accounts of a fountain in the Alhambra.

See Hermione Hobhouse, Prince Albert: His Life

and Work (London: Hamish Hamilton Limited/

The Observer, 1983), 103 (caption).

50. Bletter, "Glass Dream," 37.

51. Michael Hays, "Critical Architecture:

Between Culture and Form:' Perspecta (The Yale

Architectural Journal) 21 (1984): 15.

52. Reyner Banham. "The Glass Paradise;' A,'Chi­

tectural Review 125, no. 745 (February 1959): 88.

53. Fritz Neumeyer. "Iron and Stone: The

Architecture of the GroBstadt," in H. F. Mallgrave,

ed., Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of

Modernity (Santa Monica. Calif.: Getty Center for

the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993), 134f.

54. Kenneth Frampton, "Paul Nelson and the

School of Paris," in Joseph Abram and Terence

Riley, eds .• The Filter of Reason: Work of Paul

Nelson (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 12.

55. Judith Applegate, interview with Paul

Nelson, Perspecta 13/14 (April 1971): 75-129.

56. Kenneth Frampton, "Maison de Verre;'

Perspecta (The Yale Architectural Journal) 12

(1968): 77-126. For further discussion of the rela­

tionship between Nelson and Chareau, see Abram

and Riley, eds., The Filter of Reason: Work of Paul

Nelson (New York: Rizzoli, 1990).

57. Paul Nelson, "La Maison de la Rue Saint­

Guillaume," I:ArchitectuT'e d'aujourd'hui 4me annee.

ser. 3, vo!' 9 (Nov.-Dec. 1933): 9.

58. For an interesting but somewhat incom­

plete account of the relationship between

Nitzchke. Nelson. and Chareau. see Se'an Daly,

"Composite Modernism: The Architectural

Strategies of Paul Nelson and Oscar Nitzchke,"

Basilisk [journal online] 1, no. 1 (1995), available

at http://swerve.basilisk.com.

59. Charles Jencks, The l.anguage of Post­

Modem ArchitectuT'e (New York: Rizzoli, 1977), 15.

60. Detlef Mertins, "New Mies;' in Mertins, ed.,

The Presence of Mies (New York: Princeton Archi­

tectural Press, 1994),23.

61. Bletter, "Glass Dream," 38.

62. Rowe and Slutzky, "Transparency;' 161.

63. Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 969.

64. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Cay

fantasia on National Themes, Part T/: Perestroika,

(New York: Theater Communications Group, 1994),

13-14.

65. Koolhaas and Mau, S.M,L,XL, 510.

66. Bletter, "Glass Dream;' 43.

32

__MACOSX/WEEK 12 READINGS/._Riley_Light_Construction.pdf