Transparency and exclusion: Seeing without being

Abstract

This paper reflects upon the paradox created by transparency in architecture. The glass plane is a strategy used in modern architecture to delimit a space and at the same time to keep a continuous, instantaneous, and permanent visual relationship with the exterior environment to which it is oriented. However, despite its reflectivity and absolute transparency, the glass plane serves a second paradoxical purpose. The exterior appears actually exposed and configured through the transparent plane, but the integration of interior and exterior is only a simulation. Even though invisible, the boundary is always present. Creating a “continuous” space through an invisible boundary is hence an unattainable objective. The analysis of a scene from the film “The Wings of Desire” (Wenders, 1987) serves as a metaphor clearly showing the duality of the architectural transparency. The film characters are two angels inside a car-dealer showroom, looking at humans walking on the street outside. The showroom is designed to produce total and unobstructed visibility. Even tough everything is set up to allow the characters to encounter and feel visually integrated with the humans outside, they are helplessly apart from them. When observed through the scene, such a relationship – the interaction between people and their environment, promised by the transparency in architecture – results in ambiguity: the glass is never invisible enough to erase the separation for those who are behind it.

Key words: transparency, modern architecture, film.