Reflections: Rethinking Glass Architecture

by Gabriel Pena

Reflections is part of my research that proposes an alternative project to an architecture of transparency. My alternative project is the study of glass reflection from a sensory and phenomenological perspective, which focuses on the potential of glass architecture to produce singular atmospheres that transform our experience and perception. This research has two components, a short film and a written thesis which explores a genealogy of glass architecture, an anatomy of glass atmospheres, and a typology of glass reflection. I my research, I expose how transparency was not the main project of modern architecture, but one of its components, leaving aside the use of reflection as an important component that has been neglected. In the film, glass reflection is grounded through well known projects that have become influential in the way we understand glass architecture today. In the documentation and experience of these projects, I discuss the use and perception of the interplay between glass transparency and reflection, and the atmospheres it produces. This work is accomplished through a phenomenological approach to the concept of architectural tectonics, identifying the felt dimension in the interaction of material and immaterial elements that comprise the expressive dimension of architecture. The film offers a typology of glass reflection, as a compilation of the sensory ethnography work done in several buildings used as case studies. The main focus of the film is to capture the material and immaterial elements that inform the senses in the experience of these selected projects. While the written part of my research is laid out as clearly as possible integrating several sources of information, the video delves into my subjective experience of these atmospheres through a narrative style that strives for the poetic as a form to convey the emotional content captured in the space.

In short, Reflections is the result of sensory ethnographic field work, describing the experiential encounter of the phenomena. I see video as the medium best capable to convey time and movement, and so I used it to capture the ephemeral nature of glass reflection and the atmospheres it produces. The video was the tool used to capture and store the information generated during field research, bringing together sounds, environments, context, subjects, and the framing required to nurture sensory ethnographic work. The aim of this research is to articulate different arguments as the basis of the theoretical construction of the experience of glass reflection atmospheres.

Each chapter in the film aims to configure a polyphonic answer to the concepts of glass reflection and glass atmospheres. This structure is a refusal to elaborate a categorical answer, hoping to compose an open structure as a thesis that replicates the complexity of the material in question. I expect different interpretations to arise from the intersection of elements that do not correspond to a chronological nor a linear organization. This statement should not be understood as uncompromising, careless, or ambiguous, but rather as a commitment to structures that allow for re-interpretations going forward, or new forms of understanding that may arise in the interaction of the project elements. The articulation of these elements has been carefully studied but also experienced, informing a theory towards architectural production and practice since I cannot dissociate my training and profession as a designer from my academic research. In this process, I have employed academic guides of research, but I have never felt a constricted in doing so; moreover, I have shifted to exploratory and experimental forms of research when I felt this necessary, such as Reflections. This conforms to the nature of the interdisciplinary program in which I am enrolled, where boundaries are blurred or crossed, therefore, this research is not a “solid” disciplinary study, but a porous one. To observe the project, from a single disciplinary approach would be like reinforcing the project of transparency, ignoring that “on the other side”, there is reflection.

The film was scripted, filmed, and edited as part of the research process, allowing me to introduce ideas and positions that understand and use the phenomena of glass reflection in different ways, opening new routes of understanding, enriching the conversation, and expanding my practice both as a project and discourse. Reflections became the construction of a polyphonic foundation for the study of the phenomena. In the end, I included just two interviews that are representative of the original intention.

The buildings in the short film Reflections, explores the work of Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Nouvel, Diener & Diener, pavilions by Dan Graham, and art pieces by Gerhard Richter. During my research internship at the Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany, I travelled to each of these buildings, visiting numerous times and kept a journal of my experiences of every visit. As mentioned, the descriptions are solely based in my experience, documentation of the spaces, and the reflections produced. It was central to the project to capture the conditions in which these spaces were perceived. Reflection can be captured from a still point if light conditions remain still as well. But to talk about glass without its temporal dimension, without movement, is like talking about music without melody, or poetry without rhythm. Film allowed me to add time to the equation, to transform an image into a medium that informs about context and expresses a subjective view of my experience performing a space. Therefore, video is the ideal medium to complement the other elements in my research. Both the film and the text inform each other. The text informs the film regarding the influences of the designers, their theoretical and design approach, while the production process of the film informs the text about the necessary elements to build a glass atmosphere. Much of the descriptions of the reflective environments written in the “Anatomy of glass atmospheres” were the result of layered observations in many of the studied buildings that I filmed. Text and film operated as a coming and going between my subjectivity and objective approach to the phenomena.

The research boundaries were not fixed but were malleable entities that reorganized the attention of different elements of glass reflection. My selection does not aim to become a new narrative within the existing historiography, nor to formulate a new original position. I chose to focus my attention on Germany, while being aware that glass architecture is also developing in other places. This is an intentional exclusion of so many other avenues of glass that can contribute to the scholarly work that challenges the dominant historiography of contemporary architecture. But I insist, I am writing as an architect interested in understanding the phenomena of glass reflection in contemporary practices.  I dedicated particular attention to the social dimension of glass architecture, how glass became mobilized towards the implementation of a social program. Historically, the film does not discuss the roots of glass architecture in modern architecture, but by exploring contemporary buildings from a sensory perspective I pretend to connect to the early intentions sought in glass, echoing discussions about the influence of the Crystal Palace in literature and the western aesthetic imaginary. On the other hand, the geographical situation of these case studies is not accidental, since I see these projects linked historically to the revolutionary spirit that infused the will to transform the social program in the Weimar Republic, and consequently its architecture. Glass architecture during the Weimar Republic embodied the transformation of the modern human. It was a social project as much as it was an architectural one. But this approach should not viewed by the reader as an alternate narrative of social architecture and its repercussion on contemporary architecture; rather it is a grounding work that helps us to understand the social and ideological intent invested in glass. While there are relevant avenues in glass architecture to be explored and discussed in the post-industrial, postmodern, and trans-national narratives, these are not part of this research, since I am not writing from the perspective of the art historian, but from the position of a practitioner who is searching for clues in a specific period that can be mobilized to transform the future of glass architecture. Therefore, the contemporary architecture surveyed in this thesis is discussed in terms of my own experience, in a dialogue with glass architecture from the Weimar Republic, emphasising phenomenological and sensory properties.

Reflections expresses the ways in which glass atmospheres manifest. For this purpose, I propose that the study of glass architecture, its effects and influence over our perception of space cannot be viewed or treated as an isolated, visual phenomenon. Sensory experience emerges as the key to understanding architecture as a coproduced entity that arises in the assemblage of use and the interior and exterior conditions that affect both body and architectural object. At this point, the work of Kenneth Frampton (Studies in tectonic culture), Heinrich Wölfflin (Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture) Wilhelm Worringer (Abstraction and Empathy), and Manuel DeLanda (Assemblage Theory) is organized to engage with Gernot Böhme’s work on atmospheres (Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces). My attention interacting with these authors is limited to extracting and describing the articulation of the terms that contribute to the understanding of glass atmospheres. The film also discusses the notion of memory in architecture, and expresses how glass has the capacity to store or release energy, either in the form of “memory” or reflection. The concept of memory is informed by Giuliana Bruno’s work on light, architecture, and cinema (Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media) where glass surface is identified as a mnemonic device which has the capacity of a reflective surface to retain the memories of its surrounding space. Time and entropy are also incorporated in the film through the work of Fernandes Galiano (Fire and memory) on the role of entropy in the production and maintenance of architecture, while The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is central to explain how reflection in glass atmospheres can make us experience alternative temporalities. Reflections focusses on the means to produce reflection described perceptually. Focusing on experience and perception I selected and discriminated projects in this research by “scale”, featuring the ones that establish a relation with the human body, while rejecting those such as towers, that contribute to the construction of an urban scale that its difficult to grasp from a pedestrian perspective. Human scale according to Susan Handy and Reid Ewing refers to the proportions and qualities of a building that dialogues with our bodies size and proportions at a walking speed. [1]  Therefore, the descriptions of the phenomenon of glass reflection will have to be assumed to have a direct correspondence with a human scale.

The present research is not an historical survey of glass architecture, nor an exhaustive analysis of its origin and present, but a call to initiate a wider discussion to expose the qualities and potential of glass reflection in architecture. My intention is to reveal the mechanisms of reflection “as lived”, through presenting a collection of ideas and descriptions that redefine glass reflection from a material perspective, focused on atmospheres and the senses as the principal axis as opposed to its misconception (I argue) as a purely visual phenomenon.  As a result, this research will expand our understanding of the atmospheres of glass reflection through different disciplines, and for this very reason, it will not offer “categorical answers”, but it will sensitize the reader to the phenomena, as well as informing on its complexity and potentiality, either pointing at concrete examples, or by reconnecting historical references that may help to rearticulate the use and interpretation of glass reflection and the way these atmospheres may be assembled.

[1] Reid Ewing & Susan Handy, “Measuring the Unmeasurable: Urban Design Qualities Related to Walkability,” Journal of Urban Design, 14:1 (2009): 65-84, DOI: 10.1080/13574800802451155