Modern Architecture and Transparencies: Materiality and Virtuality

The aim is to show that the phenomenon of transparency in modern architecture, the very essence of its own production, varies in technological advances both in its material nature and its linguistic reading.

Throughout the twentieth century, a line of critical interpretation of the mechanisms of creation of modern architecture that efficiently understood the complex development of their qualities through conceptualisations derived from the modes of transparency. Conceptualisations regarding to, on the one hand, the emphasis on the phenomena of perceiving its materiality and, on the other, understanding their representative capacity. This understanding can be exposed through the phenomenological detection of various states of predominant evolution that we synthesise in four chronological sections from that are determined by the critical input of text and/or buildings whose appearance on the international scene is participating in the complex instrumentalisation of the transparent:

I.- From the first conceptualisations concerning the Modern Movement appearing at the time of the Manifesto of the International Style, focused on objective characteristics of glass as new compositional and lighting possibility.

II.- After the middle of the century when subjectivity was introduced into the complex instrumentalisation of transparency, headed by Rowe’s reread text and Slutzky‘s Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, considering both the perception (reality) and the representation (virtuality) of space by the individual.

III.- In the nineties, transparency appears on stage in its hybrid and ambiguous nature as a manifestation of its own limits and whose critical paradigm would be identified with OMA’s TGB building.

 IV.- Currently, in a continuity of research on the possibilities of the transparent, the final immersion of modernity occurs in local cultures where the Japanese architecture of the last century, led by Toyo Ito, is significantly proposed in the age of electronic globalisation.