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2

Sonja Braas, Forces # 02, 2002.

04_Sonja Braas Forces

10_Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion, Toledo, Ohio

IVAM, Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, ValenciaChristian Dior Building Omotesando, Tokyo

26_Juan Navarro Baldeweg Omaggio a Gyorgy Kepes

Tribute to Gyorgy Kepes 36_Paolo Rosselli

Fotografare Terragni e Graham Photographing Terragni and Graham

42_Pietro Valle - Dan Graham Trasparenza / Riflessione

Transparency / Reflection54_Kengo Kuma & Associates

Water/Glass, Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan60_Steven Holl Architects

Nelson Atkins Museum Garage and Sculpture Garden, Kansas City, Missouri

64_Michael Arad- Peter Walker and Partners Reflecting Absence,

World Trade Center Site Memorial, New York70_Giulio Paolini

Esposizione Universale, Kunstmuseum Winterthur76_Diller + Scofidio

Blur Building, Expo 2002, Yverdon-les-Bains, Suisse80_Herzog & De Meuron

IKMZ, Informations, Kommunikations und Medienzentrum, BTU,Cottbus, Deutschland

88_Carlos FerraterPaseo Marítimo, Benidorm, España

92_Foreign Office Architects Parque de los Auditorios, Fórum, Barcelona

Hortus Medicus, Novartis Park, Basel100_Massimiliano Fuksas

Nuovo Polo Fiera Milano, Milano112_nARCHITECTS

Canopy, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York118_Francesco Repishti

Colin Rowe e le trasparenze Colin Rowe and Transparencies

126_Michael WeselyOpen Shutter, MoMA, New York

Lotus international 125

Liquid Architecture

119

■ In the spring of 1955 Colin Rowe, architect and associ-ate professor of the course of Architectural Design at theUniversity of Texas in Austin, and Robert Slutzky, painterand professor of Drawing and Color Theory at the sameuniversity, decided to collaborate on an essay devoted tothe relationship between architecture and contemporarypainting, reflecting on the theme of transparency.

They took as their starting point Sigfried Giedion’s obser-vations in Space, Time and Architecture (1941) on the glasswall of the Bauhaus building in Dessau and his compari-son between the degree of transparency of the façade andthe multiplicity of points of reference in Picasso’s L’Arlé-sienne. For Giedion the results achieved by Gropius wentbeyond the limits of a technical realization and reached a“conception of space-time.”1

Rowe and Slutzky’s essay, on the other hand, turns on thedouble meaning of transparency—“real” and “virtual”(“literal” and “phenomenal”)—that is founded on thedistinction suggested by Gyorgy Kepes, and hence on thedifference between the literal transparency of a continu-ous glass wall and a concept of virtual transparency un-derstood as organization of space. Other intentions of thiscontribution that were declared at least in part were toencourage a method of design and to point out the differ-ences in the approaches to teaching that existed in Ameri-can universities in the fifties and sixties, and in particularthe contrast between the objectives pursued at Austin andthose of Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard.Finished the same year and expanded with further contri-butions in 1956, the essay was submitted to the most im-portant American and British magazines, but withoutsuccess. The Architectural Review refused to publish it onthe grounds that it favored the works of Le Corbusierover those of Walter Gropius.2 It was not until 1963 thatYale University invited the two authors to publish thetext in Perspecta, presenting it as “An example of amethodology for modern architectural criticism that theauthors feel will help to place this notoriously imprecisesubject on a more rigorous basis.”3

The American edition was followed by three editions inGerman with a comment by Bernard Hoesli (1968, 1974and 1982),4 one in French with an introduction by Wern-

er Oechslin (1992),5 and the same version in English(1997),6 preceded by a Spanish edition in Arquitecturaand two editions in Italian in Parametro (1980)7 and in ananthology of Rowe’s writings (1990) annotated by PaoloBerdini.8

Literal Transparency and Phenomenal Transparency

When Colin Rowe wrote his first essay on possible typesof transparency in architecture between 1955 and 1956with Robert Slutzky, the undisputed protagonist of archi-tectural criticism was the idea of architecture as space.Space was regarded not so much as a constant factor butas an idea that changes over time and according to whoconceives it: a complex intellectual and cultural construc-tion that the modernism of the twenties had helped torevolutionize by rejecting the concept of box and puttingforward those of horizontal plane (in antithesis to the val-ue of the wall) and ubiquity.So Giedion’s book brought to a definitive conclusion along period of criticism that had viewed the concept ofstructure as predominant over that of space. An interpre-tation that harked back to the topoi of the treatises of an-tiquity, later confirmed by Laugier and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and which had begun to succumb in the face of thetheories of Goethe and those of an origin of architecturein weaving proposed by Gottfried Semper, as well asAugust Schmarsow’s notion of delimitation. Schmarsow,for example, had explained the evolution of architectureas the “progressive opening up of the sensibility of manwith regard to space (Raumgefühl).”In the meantime space, as Frampton has pointed out,“has become such an integral part of the way we thinkabout architecture that we are practically unable to con-ceive it any longer without placing the maximum empha-sis on the movement in space of the subject in time.” Rowe took the cue for his essay on this subject from theclarification of the concept and definition of transparen-cy with respect to Giedion’s earlier statements and theambiguous use of synonyms such as the terms “trans-parency,” “space-time,” simultaneity,” “interpenetration,”“superimposition” and “ambivalence.” In fact the wholeof the first part of the article is devoted to testing and as-

Pablo Picasso, Le Clar inettiste, 1911;

Georges Braque, Le Portugais, 1911-12.

121

«La villa a Garches, praticamente contemporanea del

Bauhaus, può essergli giustamente confrontata. La faccia-

ta sul giardino della villa ed i prospetti delle officine del

Bauhaus non sembrano dissimili, ma solo ad uno sguardo

superficiale. Entrambi impiegano solai a sbalzo e presen-

tano un piano terra rientrante; in nessuno dei due casi è

ammessa un’interruzione dell’andamento orizzontale

delle vetrate ed entrambi mirano a conservarne la conti-

nuità in corrispondenza degli angoli dell’edificio. Ma le

corrispondenze non vanno oltre. D’ora in poi si può dire

che Le Corbusier si preoccupi soprattutto delle caratteri-

stiche legate al disegno del vetro, Gropius delle sue qualità

traslucide.» / “Le Corbusier’s villa at Garches, almost con-

temporary with the Bauhaus, might fairly be juxtaposed

with it. Superficially, the garden façade at this house and

the elevations of the workshop wing at the Bauhaus are

not dissimilar. Both employ cantilevered floor slabs, and

both display a recessed ground floor. Neither admits an in-

terruption of the horizontal movement of the glazing, and

both make a point of carrying the glazing around the cor-

ner. But now similarities cease. From here on, one might say

that Le Corbusier is primarily occupied with the planar qual-

ities of glass and Gropius with its translucent attributes…”

sisting the reader in the understanding of these differ-ences, and to the fundamental relationship between fig-ure and ground as reflected in the works of Cézanne(Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904–06), Picasso (The ClarinetPlayer, 1911), Braque (The Portuguese Man, 1911), De-launay (Simultaneous Windows, 1911), Gris (Still Life,1912), Fernand Léger (Three Faces, 1926) and Moholy-Nagy (La Sarraz, 1930). The accent on the dependency ofarchitecture on painting is the point of departure for aconceptual and indispensable clarification of the themeof transparency. In fact a further merit of this text is that of having investi-gated several particular aspects of the relationship be-tween modern painting and architecture, favored in partby the publication of Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s bookPainting Toward Architecture in 1948. An approach capa-ble of revealing, in contradiction with the previous affir-mations, the existence of a literal transparency and a phe-nomenal transparency.Unlike Giedion, who in a paradigmatic way had decreedthat the dominant motif of modernity was the inventionof a new idea of space, Rowe was able to broaden histreatment of the theme by introducing the fundamentalinterpretations of Gyorgy Kepes and Moholy-Nagy. Inhis The Language of Vision, Kepes had added anotherlevel of meaning to the term transparency: “If one seestwo or more figures overlapping one another, and each ofthem claims for itself the common overlapped part, thenone is confronted with a contradiction of spatial dimen-sion. To resolve this contradiction one must assume thepresence of a new optical quality. The figures are en-dowed with transparency: that is, they are able to inter-penetrate without an optical destruction of each other.Transparency however implies more than an optical char-acteristic, it implies a broader spatial order. Transparencymeans simultaneous perception of different spatial loca-tions. Space not only recedes but fluctuates in a continu-ous activity. The position of the transparent figures hasequivocal meaning as one sees each figure now as thecloser, now as the further one.”9 Thus the dual definitionof transparency drawn from the Oxford Dictionary andthe theories elaborated by Kepes provided the theoreticalcoordinates for development of the argument from theoutset. Following this definition, Rowe and Slutzky cameto assert that transparency is no longer what is perfectly

clear, but becomes, on the contrary, something clearlyambiguous. The references to transparency made by Moholy-Nagy inVision in Motion seem to suggest that it is possible,through a process of distortion, recomposition and doubleentendre, to realize a transparency of the context as well,revealing structural properties of the object that had pre-viously gone unobserved. Thus the adjective “transpar-ent,” which defines a purely physical state and a physicalquality of the material, and a material condition of exis-tence penetrable by light and by air, also takes on a criti-cal sense and can be a quality intrinsic to its organization. Once the concept has been clarified in its dual dimen-sion, the passage from painting to architecture is not soimmediate, either in the examples or in the attempt todemonstrate how phenomenal transparency (born withCubist painting) is a necessary component of modern ar-chitecture. In fact the difficulty of tracing a phenomenaltransparency in architecture leads to the immediate andexclusive association of this quality with the physicalqualities of glass, as Giedion takes for granted in his de-scription of the Bauhaus. In the block of workshops at Dessau the reinforced-con-crete structure is set back and the shell becomes a contin-uous glass surface, “an unambiguous space, which seemsto be free of this quality.”10 The visibility of the structureis twofold: it is not limited solely to the view from the in-side, but is evident from the outside thanks to the trans-parency of the glass and the design of the frames, whichreproduce the division into bays. The strip of the base-ment, set back and colored in dark shades, further under-lines the idea of lightness.In this building Giedion found for the first time a fulfill-ment of modern architectural research, presenting it asthe product of a spatiotemporal dynamism, as in a Cubistcomposition that allows multiple interpretations: “two ofthe aspirations of modern architecture find fulfillmenthere: not as an unconscious result of technical advances,but as a conscious realization of the artist’s aims: the sus-pended and vertical grouping of the planes that satisfiesour sense of spatial relations; and the transparency, real-ized in full, so that we are able to see simultaneously in-side and outside, en face and en profile, as in Picasso’sL’Arlésienne of 1911–12: multiplicity of levels of refer-ence or points of reference, and simultaneity—to put it

122

dirla in breve, la concezione dello spazio-tempo. In que-sto edificio Gropius raggiunge dei risultati che superano ilimiti di una realizzazione tecnica»11.

Le Corbusier vs GropiusA partire dal concetto di trasparenza il saggio di Rowe eSlutzky si prefigge di smontare l’intero percorso compiu-to da Giedion nella VI parte del suo volume dedicata alconcetto di spazio-tempo nell’arte (Cubismo e Futuri-smo), nelle sperimentazioni costruttive di Robert Maillarte nelle opere di Gropius, primo fra tutti12, Le Corbusier,Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto: per rintracciare una tra-sparenza fenomenica occorre infatti abbandonare Dessau– dove sono le qualità fisiche e simboliche del materialeche permettono quelle compenetrazioni di immagini – erivolgersi alla contemporanea villa di Le Corbusier aGarches per Michael e Gertrude Stein e Gabrielle deMonzie (1926-28).Solo nella villa a Garches si avverte «quella contraddizio-ne tra diverse dimensioni spaziali che Kepes indica comecaratteristica della trasparenza. Si assiste a una continuadialettica tra realtà e sottinteso. La realtà di uno spazioche si estende in profondità si oppone continuamente al-la intuitiva consapevolezza di uno spazio privo di taleestensione; e per via della risultante tensione, letture di-verse si susseguono necessarie»13.Un’ulteriore spiegazione di questa predilezione per Gar-ches si ritrova nel saggio Neo-“Classicism” and ModernArchitecture I, dove, come ben ricorda Paolo Berdini,Rowe teorizza che la distinzione tra funzione di sostegno,esercitata dalla struttura puntiforme in acciaio o in ce-mento armato, e la funzione di delimitazione dello spa-zio, svolta dai divisori non portanti e quindi liberi, doves-se essere dichiarata con sincerità. Una divisione di ruolitra spazio e struttura che non ammetteva né l’identità(Frank Lloyd Wright), né un rapporto gerarchico (Miesvan der Rohe).Le Corbusier passa quindi da un’idea di involucro rap-portato alla struttura – trama geometrica leggibile solonelle piante – a quello di un involucro indifferente. Conla definizione di plan libre Le Corbusier individua chiara-mente il tema centrale dell’architettura contemporanea.Non è la semplice scomparsa della struttura o la traspa-renza delle pareti a decretare il plan libre, ma come di-chiarerà lui stesso quando proporrà una classificazione in

quattro tipi del rapporto tra spazio, struttura e involucroindagato nelle sue architetture, a Garches l’edificio si di-spone a una lettura per piani verticali che dall’esternoverso l’interno combinano, come in un una composizio-ne cubista, complanarità e arretramento, profondità e let-ture di superficie: «finora ci siamo trovati a lavorare suquattro tipi diversi di pianta, ognuna in grado di espri-mere delle precise intenzioni intellettuali. Il primo tipomostra come ogni elemento sorga accanto al suo vicinosecondo una logica organica: “il dentro fa i suoi comodi espinge il fuori a formare le sporgenze e i diversi profili”(Auteuil, casa La Roche-Jeanneret). […] Il secondo tipoevidenzia invece la compressione dei diversi elementi al-l’interno di una rigida linea di inviluppo, assolutamentepura. Problema complesso, può rappresentare un piacereper lo spirito, un grosso dispendio di energia spiritualeper superare gli ostacoli che ci si è imposti (Garches, casaStein). Il terzo tipo determina, per mezzo della strutturain vista, un inviluppo semplice, chiaro, trasparente comeuna rete; consente di sistemare, ad ogni piano in mododiverso, le dimensioni di ingombro dei singoli vani, libe-ramente giustapponendoli in forma e quantità […] (Tu-nisi, villa a Cartagine). Il quarto tipo segue, per quanto ri-guarda il profilo esterno, la forma pura del secondo tipo;verso l’interno, invece, comporta gli stessi vantaggi, lequalità del primo e del terzo tipo. È questo un tipo puro,molto generoso, anch’esso pieno di risorse (Poissy, villeSavoye)»14.Per un secondo parallelo, alla stessa scala e complessitàdel Bauhaus, Rowe e Slutzky analizzano, ricorrendo al-l’immaginazione, anche il progetto del Palazzo della So-cietà delle Nazioni. Il commento al confronto non am-mette letture ambigue: in quel caso è lo spazio ad esserecristallino, mentre a Dessau era l’impiego del vetro «aconferire all’edificio una “trasparenza cristallina”». Nelduro e secco confronto tra Gropius e Le Corbusier i duedocenti di Austin dimostrano che la modernità non èomogenea e che le sue «manifestazioni non sono né iden-tiche, né di uguale valore». La trasparenza è un pretestoe non può certo essere un indice per verificare il grado diortodossia architettonica di un edificio, ma tra i due mae-stri esiste di fatto uno scarto fondamentale nell’utilizzodel vetro: da una parte un uso che produce una reale tra-sparenza (ontologica), dall’altro un uso che suggerisceuna situazione ambigua (rappresentativa), ma non solo.

«A Garches ci troviamo di fronte ad una superficie verti-

cale attraversata da una serie di finestrature orizzontali;

nel Bauhaus si ha l’impressione di una parete solida sul-

la quale le superfici vetrate vengono introdotte in

maniera massiccia. A Garches viene offerta un’indi-

cazione esplicita della struttura che regge gli sbalzi supe-

riori; il Bauhaus lascia intravedere dei pilastri piuttosto

tozzi che non vengono necessariamente collegati all’idea

di uno scheletro strutturale.» / “At Garches the ground is

conceived of as a vertical surface traversed by a horizon-

tal range of windows; at Bauhaus it is given the appear-

ance of a solid wall extensively punctured by glazing. At

Garches it offers an explicit indication of the frame which

carries the cantilevers above; at the Bauhaus it shows

somewhat stubby piers which one does not automatical-

ly connect with the idea of a skeleton structure…”

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