"Living in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an intoxication, a moral exhibitionism, that we baldly need": this is how Walter Benjamin, in his 1929 essay "Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" described the dream of living in an entirely glazed building where transparency and sincerity (not only constructive) are an ethical value even before being a design element. An affirmation rooted in the Modern Zeitgest, when glass was raised from building material to a paradigm of re-foundation for a democratic, fair and free society, in opposition to the visual (and cultural) "barriers" of the bourgeois intérieur: from the “secular cathedrals” in iron and glass, a manifesto of the emerging technologies in the early industrial age (Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace, London 1851); to the architecture of the early 20th century (Bruno Taut, Glaspavilion, Cologne 1914), the concrete realisation of Paul Scheerbart's fantastic digressions on a new “civilisation of glass” (Glasarchitektur, 1914). This is where our selection starts from, to explore decades variously transparent architecture. In the post-war period, the same moral commitment is taken up by Modernism, which proposes a light and transparent architecture as a quality and economically sustainable response to post-war housing needs, characterised by essential volumes, point structures, industrial materials, large windows that introject the landscape and enthusiastically celebrate light as a design element (Pierre Chareau, Philip Johnson, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, Lina Bo Bardi, Pierre Koenig, Albert Frey).
The glass house, in 12 landmark projects
We propose a selection of dwellings where glass is the predominant material, between fades and reflections, from Mies van Der Rohe to Lina Bo Bardi, Odile Decq to Marcel Duchamp.
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- Chiara Testoni
- 23 April 2024
While the ideological afflatus has gradually weakened over the years, the search for “poetics of evanescence” still survives, enabled by increasingly sophisticated technologies that enhance the “super-material” character of glass (as Frank Lloyd Wright defined it) and push its technical and expressive potential to the extreme. Restricting our attention to the residential field, many houses in which glass is differently used are an example of this: from translucid screens to restrict visual introspection and control the flow of light (Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP, Studio Odile Decq); to reflective or transparent enclosures that dematerialise forms (Tomas Osinski) and dissolve the boundaries between outside and inside, transforming the domestic space into an epiphanic meeting place of architecture and nature (Max Núñez); to the “glass case” that seals an entire dwelling like a museum object (Sarmiento house). Despite the privacy issues, and the problems that entirely or largely glazed constructions entail in terms of energy consumption and micro-climatic well-being, the magic of this material remains unquestionable. More than any other, as it has been noted (Guy Norderson in Michael Bell and Jeannie Kim, Engineered Transparency: the Technical, Visual, and Spatial Effects of Glass, Princeton Architectural Press, New York 2009), glass evokes the oxymoron of an absent presence and the suggestion of the “infra-mince” Marcel Duchamp talked about: that occasionally illuminating perception of an unexpected and rationally unattainable “infra-subtle” phenomenon (such as material fading, optical phantasmagorias and reflections generated by light on a glass surface) that leads to a new knowledge. Or more simply, to an interpretation of built space as an organism intrinsically as mutable as the light that passes through it, and free from codified conceptual schemes.
The house is one of the earliest (and brightest) works of Modern, which can be seen in the straightforwardness of the volumes and in the use of "industrial" materials. The shell consists of steel and translucent glass blocks alternating with transparent parts. Internally, the spatial subdivision is marked by sliding, folding or pivoting screens of glass and perforated sheet metal.
The building, designed by Johnson as a buen retiro for himself and inspired by Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House (built only a few years later but already known in its design), is an entirely glazed and transparent parallelepiped, set on a brick podium and surrounded by a large park. The interior is a single common space, interrupted only by a brick cylinder housing the services.
The house, suspended on pillars 1.5 m above the ground, is a parallelepiped that seems to float in the void, with a light metal structure painted white and a glazed shell that establishes a continuous connection with the surrounding park. The interior is a large, fluid and flexible single space, with wooden blocks containing the cloakroom, bathroom and kitchen at its centre.
The house, designed by Lina Bo Bardi for herself and her husband, is an essential transparent "box" that rises from earth on slender pilotis to reduce the footprint of the building in the lush garden dotted with tropical vegetation.
Repeatedly chosen as a film set, the house nestled in the Hollywood Hills with a spectacular view over Los Angeles, with its essential design, punctiform structures, diaphanous surfaces and the unmissable swimming pool is an emblem of hedonism as well as of Californian Modernism.
The house, built by Frey as a family home, was constructed with the intention of impacting as little as possible on the environment. The building, with its compact and functional layout, rests on a podium of concrete blocks, interpenetrating at the same time with the rocks of the surrounding landscape, and is characterised by a light metal structure, large glazed walls and a painted corrugated metal roof.
This house, nestled in the dense built fabric of Hiroshima and overlooking a busy street, regains privacy thanks to a 6,000-block screen of highly transparent optical glass that protects the garden and the house, effectively insulating from noise and perceptively letting the dynamics of the city outside filter through.
The sloping glass box, which stands out incisively in the Breton landscape, was designed as a home for a visually impaired person: the opalescent shell of the façades and roof, clad in milky white glass and glossy black panels, allows diffuse and glare-free lighting in every room. The glass panels are insulated by a thin sheet of translucent fabric to avoid shadows.
The house, set in the harsh landscape of Joshua Tree National Park, is a parallelepiped with a cantilevered structure supported by cylindrical concrete pillars: the mirrored glass cladding makes the construction literally disappear into its natural surroundings, by creating the optical illusion of vanishing from which the building is known.
This dwelling for plants, open to people, a declared homage to 19th century iron and glass constructions (from pavilions to greenhouses), houses a tropical forest of small trees, ferns, palms, mosses and orchids, in an environment where sunlight, temperature and humidity generate a unique artificial ecosystem. The main protagonist of the project is the roof, composed of two vaults in transparent glass blocks that filter light and, thanks to the striping in the inner surface, reduce direct radiation on the leaves.
The small, pitched-roof wooden house of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (7th President of Argentina), listed as a National Historic Monument in 1966, is protected by an imposing glass “display case” that preserves it from time and humidity, like a museum piece.
This Glass House, located on a rock on the eastern shore of Kootenay Lake, was conceived as a fanciful house recalling a fairy-tale castle covered with 500,000 empty, recycled bottles, arranged with their necks facing inwards and consolidated with concrete. Today, the building is a tourist attraction along British Columbia Highway 3A.