“We live for the most part in closed rooms. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is to a certain extent the product of our architecture. If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for better or for worse, to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible if we take away the closed character from the rooms in which we live. We can only do that by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass - of colored glass. The new environment, which we thus create, must bring us a new culture”.

Thus began Paul Scheerbart in his Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture), the essay published in 1914 in which the German writer exalted the flourishing of a nascent civilization ready to rise on the solid foundations of a new glass architecture.
And the 20th century, the century of iron and glass par excellence, did not disappoint Scheerbart's expectations, but rather verified many of the points presented in his singular text where “crystal rooms”, “light columns and light towers” and “glass mosaic and reinforced concrete” were prepared to welcome "light nights”, the day when glass architecture would finally take over.

Already in 1851, mankind had witnessed a colossal display of transparency with the Crystal Palace, the building realized to host the first Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations built by Joseph Paxton in Hyde Park, London: more than 90.000 square metres and some 293.000 panels of glass, held together by a futuristic, modular, prefabricated steel structure, where, for the first time, the spectacle of the industrial products and their mere contemplation was staged.

Le Corbusier

Architect Bruno Taut (to whom the Glasarchitektur is also dedicated) translates Scheerbart's imagery into the Glass Pavilion created for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne, a building dominated by a dome made entirely of small glass prisms welded by a fine copper grid and organized in a larger composition of lozenges joined by concrete sunburst ribs.

Inside the pavilion, the two spiral staircases leading to the upper level are set between glass brick walls, one of the earliest artistic expressions of a material that in Scheerbart’s opinion “may well become an interesting speciality of gIass architecture”, if conceived as a true “wall material” that can be produced in in every possible color and form.

Certainly the Tautian lyricism and the concretization of Scheerbart’s transparent utopia did not find full application in that short and very fast century that was the 20th century, and which, compared to the idea of an allegory of collective purity where glass reunites man, nature and technique, decided to give much more credit precisely to technique, and with it to the advantages of prefabrication, reproduction and serialization of materials. Nevertheless, it was on the same premises of universal harmony that had animated the expressionism of Taut’s architecture that, in the first decades of the century, Le Corbusier launched his campaign for a new spirit of architecture, and exactly the glass would be among the essential elements of the work of the Swiss master.

“Glass is the most miraculous means of restoring the law of the sun” he would write in 1935 in an essay with the equally emblematic title Glass, the fundamental material of modern architecture, and specifically Le Corbusier would predict how “one day the glass wall will become obvious, and we will not have to discuss it further” but simply accept it as the true conquest of the Modern Age.

At the time, the translucent Nevada tile produced by the historic St. Gobain company had already been used as a glass wall in many residential buildings designed by Le Corbusier in Paris, such as the Maisons Loucheur (1928-29), the Swiss Pavilion at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris (1929-31), the Immeuble Molitor (1930-33) - where his own studio house was located on the attic - the Cité de Refuge (1929-33), as well as the Maison Clarté in Geneva (1930-32). Le Corbusier thus resolved that contradictory desire of the inhabitant of the house to want at the same time the pleasure of observing “the play of the sky, trees, or general views outside, and secondly, that desire to be secluded from the outside and especially to have some privacy”.

In the same years, again in Paris, and precisely between 1928 and 1931, the collaboration between the designer Pierre Chareau, the craftsman Louis Dalbet, specialised in metalworks, and the Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoet, gave rise to the famous Maison de verre, an apartment hidden within the Parisian urban blocks, whose treatment of the façades gives name to the project.

Constructed entirely of translucent panels and organized in modules of 6x4 glass tiles, which also regulate the dimensions of the entire project, the façades demonstrate an extremely sophisticated use of the material, which finally reveals itself almost in the image of a delicate veil suspended in space, easily associable with the paper screens of the traditional Japanese houses, all welded with the steel structure that rather marks the industrial aesthetic of the flat.

Inside, too, the opaque walls return, together with imposing exposed-steel columns, and the characteristic tudded-rubber flooring, decontextualized, and presented in one of its first domestic uses.

As the modernist fever faded, and with it the end of the exaltation of the techniques and the valorization of industrial materials, in favor of a progressive reconquest of the more human dimension of architecture, it is in more recent times that the use of glass, intended as glass wall, has decisively returned to connote public and private architecture.
In 1977 an article in The New York Times announces without preamble that Glamorous Glass Bricks Are Booming, and points out a long list of residential buildings in New York where the wall made of glass tiles is protagonist, but above all «alluring and mysterious, bright and sparkling, formal, but intimate».

And so it is on this same wave that next century seems to be invested by the constant return of glass-brick architecture, at times considered as a real trend coming back from the past, at others included in a more articulated discourse, destined to deepen the most innovative techniques, for example the printing and cementing of bricks without the use of traditional mortar.

Among the most famous ‘glass architectures’ of the 21st century, one cannot fail to mention the Japanese headquarters of Maison Hermès, designed in Tokyo by Renzo Piano (1998 - 2001).

Aesthetically, glass is congenial to the building’s strong characterization in the visually heterogeneous context of the metropolis. The 15 floors of the Maison soar within a long and narrow lot (45x11 m), and are entirely cladded in a single element, a 45 cm square glass module, repeated 13.000 times, which at night is backlit by the brand’s iconic orange color.

The technical challenge in this case is closely linked to the location, and to perfect respond to the seismic problems of the area, so that each tile is mounted on a frame with a 4 mm movement capacity with respect to the adjacent tiles, so that each of the 13.000 glass blocks of the façade can absorb its own share of seismic movement to each side.

Still in Japan, in Hiroshima, Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP realizes a dwelling in a particularly busy street in the downtown area.
In this case too, in the Optycal Glass House (2012), the glass fulfils the task of characterizing the building in a general context of skyscrapers and office buildings, as well as protecting it from the metropolitan chaos. The street façade consists of approximately 6.000 glass bricks, which, due to their substantial thickness, provide excellent acoustic insulation; moreover, each of them has holes to fix the blocks to 75 stainless steel bolts suspended from a large beam above the façade, in order to make statically stable what is actually perceived by city as a real 8.6 x 8.6 m wide semi-transparent screen.
Behind the façade, the architects place a large winter garden as an additional filter between the domestic life and the city, suggesting to passers-by the view of a real secret place, and revealing the shadows of large trees and plants.

Other examples include MVRDV’s Crystal Houses project in Amsterdam (2016), where glass bricks are seamlessly applied to the traditional red brick façades, with a result that in this case privileges the search for a glamorous image over the technical-scientific reason concerning the choice of material. In this case, the use in interior design of the glass tile developed as a wall and partition screen actually seems to wink at a 1980s aesthetic, rather than exploring its still unexpressed material potential.

In any case, there is no doubt how glass-brick has been one of the favorite materials of the mature rationalism’s architects, often used with audacity, especially thanks to its malleability and reproducibility, and at the same time for its evident capacity to guarantee, through transparency, one of the main elements sought by modern architecture, light.

It is equally unquestionable how the debt contracted with the old masters by some of the main exponents of contemporary architecture, ends up paying sincere homage to their experimental work, like Piano's Maison Hermès, sometimes managing to find space for new inventive formulas and for the exploration of new techniques in the use of what with good reason, can be declared the first of the modern materials of architecture, and which, to quote Paul Scheerbart one last time, in its noblest declinations, caused “the earth to be adorned with sparkling jewels and enamels, in a such unimageable glory".

Opening image: Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Maison Hermès, Tokyo, 1998-2006. Domus 841, October 2001