engineered transparency: the technical, visual and spatial effects of glass

editors : michael bell and jeanne kim publisher: princeton architectural press year: 2009 size: 272 pages, 20 x 26.7 cm isbn: 978-568998-798-9 http://www.papress.com _____________________________________________________________

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glass is one of the most ubiquitous and extensively researched building materials. despite the critical role it has played in modern architecture in the last century, we have yet to fully comprehend the cultural and technological effects of this complex and sophisticated building material.

content engineered transparency brings together a multi-disciplinary group of international architects, engineers, manufacturers, and critics to collectively reconsider glass within the context of recent engineering and structural achievements. in light of these advancements, glass has re-emerged as a novel architectural material, offering new and previously unimaginable modes of visual pleasure and spatial experience.

the book is a portfolio of various glass projects including SANAA’s glass pavilion at the toledo museum of art, yoshio taniguchi’s MoMA expansion in new york city, and steven holl’s nelson-atkins museum in kansas city, along with contributions from antoine picon, reinhold martin, richard tomasetti and steven holl. engineered transparency redefines glass as a 21st century building material and challenges our assumptions about its aesthetic, structural, and spatial potential. is it for me? suitable for those who are interested in the structural applications of glass. it provides a good selection of technical and photographic illustrations, giving one a better understanding of the effects of this understated material.

glass pavilion, toledo museum of art, toledo, ohio by SANAA glass pavilion, toledo museum of art, toledo, ohio by SANAA

a rendering of the glass pavilion, toledo museum of art, toledo, ohio by SANAA

11 march memorial, atocha train station, madrid, spain by FAM arquitectura y urbanismo S.L.

11 march memorial, atocha train station, madrid, spain by FAM arquitectura y urbanismo S.L.

— here is an excerpt from the book – francois roche’s exploration of ‘shadow and light’ a glass recycling project to build the FRAC center (fonds regional d’art contemporain) in orléans, france:

‘glass is both a substance and an ideology‘ – FR

bottle aggregation

‘to use jacques lacan’s metaphor, I refuse to look at myself in the mirror. in this way I reject the possibility of reassembling the multiple fragments – the multiple disorders – I have to articulate’. FR

(words by francois roche) the recycling ‘bachelor apparatus’ the commission was to renovate the FRAC (fonds regional d’art contemporain), a regional museum of contemporary art in the city of orleans, in central france. it is also a venue for archilab, a wild collection of radical and experimental architecture. you can imagine how deeply problematic it could be for an architect to design a museum where his own work is part of the collection.

it’s like digging your own grave in a frozen cemetery designed by you. more seriously, the main difficulty was defining a scenario for weaving together visitors and pieces of the collection. we wanted it to be the opposite of a graveyard; we thought it should be alive and breathing, like an organism able to swallow and digest the visitor: a museum as a nonpanoptic cabinet of curiosities, where people could lose themselves, when the user’s manual itself is lost, on a permanent vacation or in a permanent transformation, like ‘the house that jack built’,an episode of the 1960s television series ‘the avengers’.

bottle aggregation

our heterotopic proposal involved dreaming up a ‘corps sans organe’, a body without an organ (BwO) in the sense of antonin artaud or gilles deleuze (…)

bottle aggregation

to predefine the emerging shape, we first dripped liquid sugar on an ugly model then we parametrically reinterpreted this morphology through scripting. stacked to a depth of three to six meters, the glass was produced via an endless process of accumulation – through a kind of duchampian ‘bacelor machine’. our objective was to make the machine work randomly, as an agent of indeterminism. (…)

top view of bottle growth

first the glass stack swallowed the building; then it swallowed the courtyard, turning it into a glas quarry, colonizing boundaries and vitrifying the city. (…)

rendering of infrastructure, fonds regional d’art contemporain(FRAC), orléans, france

to reduce the cost of the apparatus, we worked with the bottle-recycling department at saint saint-gobain, one of the major manufacturers of glass in france. we needed two millions of glass sticks from a double-quantity of bottles. first we proposed to use 10 percent of the region’s twenty-thousand annual tons of recycled glass; second, we proposed a longitudinal construction process spread over thirty years, like the building of antoni gaudi’s sagrada familia in barcelona, spain. thus, the FRAC would not make an iconic statement; it would be a dynamic apparatus, where the machine becomes a vector of indeterminate intensities. it is a twelve meter high robot, able to fully disappear by hiding itself in the substances it aggregates. it is a massive, nontransparent, green blur with a reflection-refraction effect, like the bottom of a bottle. (…)

rendering of robot in courtyard

scale model

in this labyrinth, we introduced a PDA-like techology to help visitors determine their own location via a global positioning system (GPS) and radio-frequency identification (FID). this device remedies the lack of control and can be used to navigate or escape trajectories and to find a restroom or get beamed up – scotty to the exit -. at the same time it creates the possibility for random, self-curatorial movement, where you might confuse your own paranoia with the unreality of your perception.

access routes

view from street