lecture 1 transparency - Vidler Notes

Notebook: CAF20_lectures_1_transparency
Created: 9/23/2020 3:53 PM Updated: 9/30/2020 11:03 AM
Author: stefanoppasseri@gmail.com

VIDLER, TRANSPARENCY FROM ARCHITECTURAL UNCANNY (1992)

217
transparency from Bentham to Corb
Giedion: a single indivisible space
X-Ray: T opened up machine arch for inspection

218
Breton/Bataille - glass/dust
opacity (i.e. phenomenal transparency?) "glass is now revealed in its
opacity"

219
opacity, literal and phenomenal --> Postmodernism
watchword for roots, tradition, regionalism...

tranp comes back with a vengeance

France
Louvre pyramid - make a new monument disappear in relation to
context - but does it?

following a decade of "false walls" - according to popular argument

- "Potemkin village" of PoMo falls apart and there is a return to the
"spirit of the age"

220
literal transp is difficult to achieve
quickly turns to obscurity (its opposite) or reflectivity (its revresal)

why transparency?
crisis of confidence in monumentality?
to work effectively, the ideology of the modern has to be a fiction
of practice (Mies, Evans?)

"weak" monumentality (Vattimo)

221
a new kind of transparency after PoMo? Something that embraces
the original impulse but also problematizes it
OMA - Tres Grande Bibliotheque
amoebal shapes inside the cube - partly revealed through
translucency - one doesn't quite know what is seen
not opaque/not transparent "transparency is converted into
translucency and this into darkness and obscurity"
suspended in a difficult moment between knowledge and blockage
estrangement
uncanny

222
defamiliarization in OMA translucency?
"conflation of the familiar (seen) and the strange (projected)" - he is
talking about images projected in mirrors in fiction

223
anxiety of suspended perception - one is stuck between
transparency and opacity but the perception cannot settle
theater

224
Delirious NY - paranoid critical method of Dali - is this what's at
play in French National Library facade?

225
Koolhaasian "soft space"
new conditions of interior and exterior and in between, perception
of
reformulates transparency beyond opposites of literal and
phenomenal