“Transparency” can act as a shockingly opaque word, and its use in architectural discourse has been regrettably muddy. While the folk adage of people living in glass houses needing to curb their stone throws lives on, Philip Johnson’s glass house transitions into a crowded tourist Mecca, leaving Johnson’s original commitment to a lucidly stark interpenetration of house and landscape behind. As Helmut Jahn, pioneering 20th-century architect of innovative transparency, and a muse to the 21st-century designers in this book, wrote in the 1990s: “Transparency is not the same as looking straight through a building: it’s not just a physical idea, it’s also an intellectual one.”

 

With Immaterial World: Transparency in Architecture (The Monacelli Press, $45), Marc Kristal has created just the right kind of introductory overview to recent trends in architectural transparency. Eschewing academic theories, Kristal’s presentation – 200 color illustrations of 25 projects matched with 200 pages of illuminating text – touches on both the intellectual and physical implications of designing with transparency in mind.

 

Although most of Kristal’s examples are well-known, they take on additional meaning in this sensitively curated selection. The Alice Tully Hall redesign by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, with FXFOWLE Architects, is masterfully framed as a design lending transparency and lightness to all of Lincoln Center, suggesting building transparency as a gift that extends to the larger urban fabric.

 

Less publicized but equally stunning, Alejandro Aravena’s “Siamese Twins” Chilean laboratory thickens conventional notions of transparent design through encasing a fiber-cement structure suggesting Siamese twins within a floating glass skin. Aravena’s rhythmic interplay of glass and fiber-cement, public and private spaces, for his campus laboratory finds parallels in a number of other designs. Toyo Ito’s Tod’s Omotesando, a flagship luxury-brand store in a swanky section of Toyko, showcases transparent openings unpredictably punctuating an opaque volume. At night the store glows like a larger-than-life, ribbon-festooned, gift package with a luminous present hidden deep within.

 

What emerges from these projects that encompass a range from modest private homes to skyscrapers is a deep appreciation of transparency (in all of its myriad forms) becoming as versatile a feature in 21st-century architecture as the basic black dress in a fashionable wardrobe. Christian de Portzamparc’s Renaissance Paris Arc de Triomphe Hotel shimmeringly adds a shock of the new to the otherwise staid Avenue de Wagram through a façade suggesting six floors of undulating glass ribbons. Although Portzamparc was aware of zoning requiring all buildings within 500 meters of the Arc de Triomphe to be built from stone, he astonishingly finds the bureaucrat who lets his design materialize, this official bonhomme who proclaims, “This is against the rules but it’s beautiful, and it is not my duty to be against creation.”

 

Eminently browsable, Kristol’s book invites additional research, reflection, and archi-tourism. The photography is first-rate, the writing sharply entertaining and informative. Only the title might be improved. How about Architecture through the Looking Glass: Architectural Adventures in Transparency?

 

Norman Weinstein writes about architecture and design for Architectural Record, and is the author of “Words That Build” – an exclusive 21-part series published by ArchNewsNow.com – that focuses on the overlooked foundations of architecture: oral and written communication. He consults with architects and engineers interested in communicating more profitably; his webinars are available from ExecSense. He can be reached at nweinstein@q.com.

 

More by Weinstein:

 

A Meditation on the Beauty of Zaha Hadid's Door Handle

Hadid's design issues a challenge: define beauty by lyrically playing with illusion.

 

Why "Greatest Hits" Lists by Architecture's Stars Should Be Mocked
Transferring the musical or cinematic "greatest hits" list mind-set to architecture is deleterious, and here's why.

 

Celebratory Meditations on SANAA Winning the Pritzker Prize

 

Op-Ed: Life After Ada: Reassessing the Utility of Architectural Criticism 
Ada Louise Huxtable deserves mucho thanks and praise - but other questions moving us to a new flavor of criticism have to be asked.

 

Book Review: "Visual Planning and the Picuresque" by Nikolaus Pevsner. Edited by Mathew Aitchison
A rediscovered manuscript unveils a portrait of the famed architectural historian as neglected urban designer. His commitment to the picturesque aesthetic for buildings and towns is as urgently needed as ever.

 

Book Review: How New Urbanism's Case Triumphs Best Through "The Language of Towns & Cities: A Visual Dictionary" by Dhiru A. Thadani
Thadani's oversized reference charms, infuriates, and enlightens.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2010
Ten books pointing the way to larger professional horizons

 

Book Review: "Architecture and Beauty: Conversations with Architects about a Troubled Relationship": Yael Reisner exuberantly interviews architects about beauty
Any of you architects seen Mr. Keats Lately?

 

Book Review: Shedding Light on Concrete: Tadao Ando: Complete Works 1975-2010 by Philip Jodidio
Photographic presentation of a poet of light and concrete triumphs over lackluster commentary.

 

Book Review: Sage Architectural Reflections from Architecture's "Athena": Denise Scott Brown's "Having Words" distills a lifetime of theorizing and practice into practical and succinct guidance for thriving through difficult times
Brown's occasional papers trace a trenchant trajectory of learning from Las Vegas to learning from everything.

 

Book Review: Keeping the Architectural Profession Professional: "Architecture from the Outside In: Selected Essays by Robert Gutman" celebrates Gutman's legacy as invaluable outsider
Selected essays by a penetrating sociologist of architecture pose the kinds of tough-minded questions needed now to keep architectural professional on-track.

 

Book Review: "Design through Dialogue: A Guide for Clients and Architects," by Karen A. Franck and Teresa von Sommaruga Howard
A helpful communications primer offers case studies of winning collaborations between clients and architects, but as useful as this book proves, it leaves some uncomfortable questions about communication unaddressed.

 

Twilight Visions: Vintage Surrealist Photography Sheds New Light on Architecture 
An exhibition and book of photographs of Paris between the wars might just be the necessary correctives to the virtual sterility of digital imagery

 

Best Architecture Books of 2009 
10 crucial volumes from the classic to the iconoclastic

 

Book Review: "Gunnar Birkerts: Metaphoric Modernist" by Sven Birkerts and Martin Schwartz

A major architect in the history of Modernism finally receives recognition – and sundry asides about why Modernism never exited.

 

Book Review: "Urban Design for an Urban Century: Placemaking for People," by Lance Jay Brown, David Dixon, and Oliver Gillham 
To the credit of the erudite authors, their sketch of urban design brings levels of political, sociological, and architectural analysis together in a readable synthesis.

 

Book Review: "Everything Must Move: 15 Years at Rice School of Architecture 1994-2009" 
There’s a Texas flood of architectural ideas that gives ample evidence of an architecture school that unsettles pat assumptions. Who could ask for anything more?

 

Book Review: A Subversive Book Every Architect Needs: "Architect's Essentials of Negotiation" by Ava J. Abramowitz 
Supposedly architects don't need negotiating skills along with other communication skills because great design "sells itself." How lovely that an AIA legal counsel created this definitive book to shatter that thin myth.

 

Book Review: A Perspective from One Elevation: "Conversations With Frank Gehry" by Barbara Isenberg

Gehry's conversations offer portraits of an astute listener as well as talker, an architect as aware of his flaws and limitations as of his virtues.

 

Best Architecture Books of 2008 
10 tomes from the superior to the indispensable

 

Book Review: You've Got to Draw the Line Somewhere

A review of Drafting Culture: a Social History of Architectural Graphic Standards by George Barnett Johnston

 

Book Review: "NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith," edited by Franklin Sirmans

Sharpen your pencils - and get ready to do a NeoHooDoo shimmy.