Social, political and cultural layers of transparency Can glass allow both security and openness?

摘要

Columbia University's recent interdisciplinary conference on transparency aimed, according to the convenors, to 'bring an ordinarily extraordinary material back before our eyes'. It is 44 years since the publication of Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky's seminal text on 'literal' and 'phenomenal' transparency. Today, the material and spatial properties connoted by this word, loaded with complex cultural and political associations, remain important to architectural theorists. Rowe and Slutzky's argument - that a focus on surface transparency misses the potential depth of transparency in experience - is as pertinent now as in 1964. In parallel, the physical, material properties of glass and facade technologies remain a rich area of research for engineers. Columbia's event, titled Engineered Transparency, attempted to exploit relationships between engineering and architectural theory towards a cross-disciplinary understanding of this most opaque of transparent subjects -glass. Convened by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, both at Columbia, with the Institute of Building Construction at the Technische Universitat Dresden, the conference was organised faultlessly over two days. Around 40 speakers addressed a range of material and theoretical concerns.