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Glass’s domination as the material
for architectural expression since the middle of last century
is evident in a comparison of Manhattan’s skyline today
with a photograph of the same before 1952. This year marks
the completion of Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s Lever
House on Park Avenue, the first all-glass curtain wall exterior
for what came to be ubiquitous, the boxy office buildings
in Midtown and beyond. A number of factors coincided to displace
stone by glass: advances in structural engineering and façade
systems, the fabrication of ever-larger pieces of flat glass,
a need for more daylight in deeper floor plates, the improved
thermal properties of glazing systems, and a desire for expressing
lightness and transparency. Over fifty years later these considerations
(structure, fabrication, thermal performance, vision, and
metaphor) remain the domains for researching and evaluating
glass in architecture.
These explorations are documented in Engineered Transparency,
the product of a symposium of the same name at Columbia University
in September 2007, a three-day event sponsored by Oldcastle
Glass with The Architect’s Newspaper as the
official media partner. A collaboration between Columbia University’s
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
(GSAPP) and the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering
Mechanics, the symposium and book are equal parts architecture
and engineering, theory and practice, eye candy and data.
The further involvement of the Technische Universtitat, Dresden’s
Institute of Building Construction guarantees a balance between
technical material research and what Dean Mark Wigley describes
as GSAPP’s “radical experimentation … as
a laboratory on the future of the built environment.”
The book’s five main chapters—essays, projects,
technical innovations (material and structural), and the visual
and spatial aspects of glass—follow this architecture-engineering
split, even though the symposium and proceedings try to overcome
such a condition. The first chapter prevails in linking the
current exploration in glass to its historical impetus, primarily
Paul Scheerbart’s 1914 book Glasarchitektur,
but also Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1851 before
it and Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s influential essay
“Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal” from 1964.
Each essay carves a niche from the various considerations
of glass and its effects, from its manufacture and structural
properties to the material’s varying degrees of transparency.
What the essays make up for in diversity they lack in breadth
of investigation, merely scratching the surface (no pun intended)
of the myriad theoretical and practical issues surrounding
the material. The potential of laminated glass in projects
like Herzog & de Meuron’s 40 Bond and Kruunenberg
Architecten’s innovative Laminata House is one glaring
omission ripe for exploration. The same deficiency is found
in the projects and technical papers that follow, a reflection
of the symposium format and its regurgitation in book form
more than the individual contributions. An extremely broad
range of material is presented in the book and the companion
DVD featuring symposium highlights, but it is far from a complete
picture. Each paper can be seen as a starting point or provocation
for the reader’s continued investigation elsewhere.
Preceding the chapters above is a brief portfolio of the
buildings of SANAA, the collaboration between Kazuyo Sejima
and Ryue Nishizawa, the former who gave the symposium’s
keynote lecture. Their 2006 Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum
of Art in Ohio sets a benchmark for the current apotheosis
and future potential of glass in architecture, an embodiment
of the considerations of last century in a decidedly 21st-century
idiom. The design minimizes structure to the extent that the
floor to ceiling spans of frameless, laminated glass seem
to hold up the roof; sophisticated mechanical balancing and
daylighting systems allow this single material to predominate;
and a plethora of curved glass corners creates refractions,
reflections, and layers to become, as Beatriz Colomina describes,
“optical devices without any visible mechanisms ...
[where the viewer] is suspended in the view itself.”
Most uniquely, where editor Michael Bell and others point
out the importance of insulated glazing units (IGUs) in façades,
the Glass Pavilion expands these double layers to the scale
of the building itself. Individual rooms defined by glass
walls are held apart, with the inaccessible cavity space acting
as a thermal buffer and becoming “the real space of
the project,” again in Colomina’s words.
SANAA’s pavilion is a perfect manifestation of the
book’s title phrase, the merging of the technical and
the phenomenal aspects of glass. Research and engineering
allows the material’s exploitation in the design, while
the pavilion’s spatial experiences are unanticipated
by the material’s technical input. Engineered Transparency
provides a decent theoretical and technical background for
a contemporary understanding of glass, one that leaves few
areas unexplored, if only preliminarily so.
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