This volume explores the concept of "spatial transparency"; a form of spatial continuity that articulates depth through permeable, layered, or porous three-dimensional organizations where interstitial light is present. Although transparency is a concept largely associated with the modern movement, the use of glazed components, and twentieth-century architectural discourse, spatial transparency is a form of depth awareness through intermediate domains, takes place through the interstitial fabric of a structure, and occurs when several consecutive domains are spatially and visually connected. These immersive environments invite active participation, not as one-way communication but as a series of visual and experiential exchanges, interdependencies, and relationships. Divided into four parts, the book examines spatial transparency in massive opaque constructions, light constructions, glass assemblies, and hybrid systems. It analyzes both the phenomenon of visual connectivity and continuity through intermediate spaces, and spatial transparency’s capacity for promoting and enabling graded, interflowing environmental transactions. Using historical and contemporary examples, it catalogs some of the most common and recurring configurations that manifest these characteristics. Over 20 international case studies from the Americas to Japan are presented to argue that environments exist in porous mediums and that by studying the openings, voids, light, and materials of layered and/or permeable organizations, important insights about space making can be revealed. Written for students and academics, this book explores various expressions of spatial transparency in architecture and helps connect their abstract ideas with significant built works, analytical drawings, and comparison charts.

This compilation of work by Architect Gordon Gilbert explores the idea of transparency in architecture, ranging from an open physical transparency, to clarity of structure, to the dematerialization of the physical object, and further to evolving and expanding states of architectural awareness. This exploration is facilitated through a revealing juxtaposition of experimental drawing, subliminal texts, and constructed work.With essays by Michael Sorkin, Zvi Hecker, Lebbeus Woods, and Christian W. Thomsen.

Glass is one of the most ubiquitous and extensively researched building materials. Despite the critical role it has played inmodern architecture in the last century, we have yet to fully comprehend the cultural and technological effects of thiscomplex and sophisticated building material. Engineered Transparency brings together an extraordinary, multidisciplinary group of international architects, engineers, manufacturers, and critics to collectively reconsider glasswithin the context of recent engineering and structural achievements. In light of these advancements, glass hasreemerged as a novel architectural material, offering new and previously unimaginable modes of visual pleasure andspatial experience. Engineered Transparency presents a portfolio of projects featuring cutting-edge glass designs by todays most innovative architects, including SANAA's acclaimed 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. With contributions by foremost thinkers in the field of architecture and design including historians Kenneth Frampton, Antoine Picon, and DetlefMertins; cultural critics Beatriz Colomina, Joan Ockman, and Reinhold Martin; engineers Werner Sobek, Guy Nordenson,and Richard Tomasetti; and architects Kazuyo Sejima, Steve Holl, and Elizabeth Diller, Engineered Transparency redefines glass as a 21st century building material and challenges our assumptions about its aesthetic, structural, and spatial potential.

"Transparency," by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, originally published in English in 1964 (in Perspecta 8), followed by a German translation in 1968, is one of the main modern reference texts for any student of architecture. Rowe and Slutzky co-founded the architects group "Texas Rangers" at the University of Texas in Austin, together with John Hejduk, Werner Seligmann and Bernhard Hoesli. In conjunction with their teaching activities, the group members sought to develop a new method for architectural design and proceeded to test their models in the teaching environment. This edition of Transparency is provided with a commentary by Bernhard Hoesli and an introduction by the art and architecture historian Werner Oechslin.

Examining the transformation of transparency as a metaphor in West German political thought to an analogy for democratic architecture, this bookquestions the prevailing assumption in German architectural circles that transparency in governmental buildings can be equated with openness, accessibility and greater democracy. The Transparent State traces the development of transparency in German political and architectural culture, tying this lineage to the relationship between culture and national identity, a connection that began before unification of the German state in the eighteenth century and continues today. The Weimar Republic and Third Reich periods are examined although the focus is on the postwar period, looking at the use of transparency in the three projects for a national parliament - the 1949 Bundestag project by Hans Schwippert, the 1992 Bundestag building by Gunter Behnisch and the 1999 Reichstag renovation by Norman Foster. Transparency is an important issue in contemporary architectural practice; this book will appeal to both the practising architect and the architectural historian.

"Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture brings to light complex readings of transparent glass through close observations of six pivotal works of architecture. Written from the perspectives of a practitioner, the six essays challenge assumptions about fragility and visual transparency of glass. A material imbued with idealism and utopic vision, glass has captured architects' imagination, and glass' fragility and difficulties in thermal control continue to present technical challenges. In recent decades, architecture has witnessed an emergence of technological advancements in chemical coating, structural engineering, and fabrication methods that resulted in new kinds of glass transparencies. Buildings examined in the book include a sanatorium with expansive windows delivering light and air to recovering tuberculosis patients, a pavilion with crystal clear glass plenum circulating air for heating and cooling, a glass monument symbolizing the screen of personal devices that shortened the distance between machines and humans, and a glass building symbolizing the the social and material intertwining in the glass ceiling metaphor. Connecting material glass to broader cultural and social contexts, Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture enlightens students and practitioners of architecture as well as the general public with interest in design. The author demonstrates how glass is rarely crystal clear but is blurred both materially and metaphysically, revealing complex readings of ideas for which glass continues to stand"--

For the past decade, the Los Angeles architect Michael Maltzan has designed multiunit housing in a city known for its proliferation of single-family residences. Working with the Skid Row Housing Trust, these projects advance new forms of supportive housing that address the services and infrastructures needed for their particular populations of inhabitants. For Maltzan, housing manifests an incredibly complex set of spatial problems--social, economic, political, typological, aesthetic, and urban--that recast architecture's role in framing the social relationships and individual challenges of everyday urban life. Social Transparency includes a recent lecture by Maltzan at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, as well as reflections from fellow practitioners on this sustained engagement with housing and the city.