Journal of Architectural Education,

pp. 67 Q 2003 Anthony Vidler

Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal 6
ANTHONY VIDLER
Cooper Union for the Advancement
of Science and Art
Transparency
Literal and Phenomenal
All art tends toward structuring the contradiction
between that which appears and that which signies,
between form and meaning. Neither eld nor gure,
however minimal, can avoid the burden of content;
even the blank canvas, a eld for any and all con-
guration, itself possesses intrinsic structural attrib-
utes, becoming a gure in a larger perceptual con-
text. Through our perception of its edge condition, its
size and proportion, its surface denition, and its
reexivity, it loses its neutrality. These factors com-
bine to exude spatiality, stimulating an emergent
awareness of heavier bottom/descending center/
lighter top (foreground/middle ground/background),
of latitudinal and longitudinal compression and ten-
sion (horizontality and verticality), which in turn sug-
gest notions of landscape and interior. In such a way,
this tabula rasa provokes our ctive and fantasizing
perceptions, attracting an inll of extrinsic imageries,
still vague, unordered, and even dreamlike, yet rmly
rooted in past experience and historical and cultural
memory.
Robert Slutzky, Aqueous Humor
In his brief introduction to an essay on the watery
forms of Le Corbusiers painting and architecture,
Robert Slutzky condenses, so to speak, the central
construct of his practice, a practice that, through
and by means of painting, has insistently registered
the sometimes ambiguous, but always present, spa-
tial relations between the painted plane and the
architectonic volume. In this sense, although paint-
ing may always be carefully separated from architec-
ture in its formal aims and social intentions, the two
arts have, in Slutzkys work, developed an endless
reciprocity, whereby painting is taken, as Le Corbu-
sier assumed but hardly theorized, as a laboratory
for architecture, or better, as architecture in itself.
In this sense, the painted surface is viewed as
transparent to space, acting less as a substitute for
a window (the commonplace of perspectival rep-
resentation) as for a series of superimposed layers,
implied or revealed, that both project and introject a
spatial construction.
Slutzky has elaborated the theoretical bases for
such transparency in a series of articles, beginning
in 1955 with his essay, written in collaboration with
Colin Rowe, Transparency: Literal and Phenome-
nal. Transparency, of course, was a fetish of mod-
ernism, attaining the status of what Colin Rowe
termed a sacred cow for architects like Walter
Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. From the Expres-
sionist glass architecture of Bruno Taut and Paul
Scheerbart and Mies early projects for glass sky-
scrapers, to Gropiuss Fagus Werke and Bauhaus
(the corner of which was in turn fetishized by Sig-
fried Giedion in Space, Time and Architecture as an
equivalent to cubism in painting), and thence to the
universalization of the glass curtain wall as the
emblem of corporate modernism, transparency was
seen largely as a literal, visual, attribute of the mod-
ern, a virtue, equivalent to social democracy, dis-
playing the open society from outside to inside.
In their dangerous and explosive little essay
as Rowe called it, however, Slutzky and Rowe
worked to criticize this by then-normalized tradition
through a rigorous application of Gestalt theory to
the experience of architecture, modernist and
humanist. In their rst essay, they distinguished
between what they called literal and phenome-
nal transparency in the work of Le Corbusier, and
especially his rejected project for the League of
Nations competition in 1927, demonstrating the
extraordinary complexity of Le Corbusiers response
to transparency compared with that of Walter Gro-
pius (Rowe opined that it was for this reason that
the then editor of Architectural Review, Nikolaus
Pevsner, refused the essay for publication); in the
second essay, they took on Renaissance facades
the Ca doro in Venice and Michelangelos project
for San Lorenzoin every case relating their analy-
ses to painting, cubist and post-Cubist.
Now these two essays, published in 1964 and
1971, respectively, were certainly the result of a col-
laboration and have been republished as such in
two collections of essays by Colin Rowe. Rowe him-
self remembered the importance of Slutzkys contri-
bution thus: to my own naive arguments about
Theo van Doesburg and De Stijl as interactive with
Le Corbusiers Maison Domino Robert added a very
big proviso. As a Fernand Leger and a Piet Mon-
drian man he insisted upon the assertive contribu-
tions of frontality and upon the supremacy of the
picture plane. Or, in other words, he insisted upon
statements of atness as being provocative of argu-
ments about depth. On the second essay, Rowe
noted that Robert did not entirely approve of the
results. Neither of these acknowledgments, I think,
do justice to Slutzkys full contribution to the
Transparency debate. And, although it might be
impossible, even for Slutzky himself, to disentangle
the precise nature of his intervention, I have done a
little research that might throw some light on the
matter. My method: reading Rowe backward from
1956, and reading Slutzky forward from then.
Up to 1956, Rowes discourse on architecture,
as evinced in his seminal essays, The Mathematics
of the Ideal Villa, and Mannerism and Modern
Architecture (1947 and 1950), his masters thesis
on the theoretical drawings of Inigo Jones, together
with his review of Talbot Hamlins Forms and Func-
tions of Twentieth Century Architecture, were largely
concerned, following his training under Rudolph
Wittkower, with drawing modern architecture (and
Le Corbusier in particular) back to the classical tra-
dition, or, more precisely, back to the Palladian and
mannerist deformations of that tradition. These
concerns certainly emerge again in at least the sec-
ond of the Transparency essays, where the
facades of Michelangelos designs for San Lorenzo,
Florence, are subjected to the kind of interpretative
scrutiny developed by Wittkower in his analysis of
7 vidler
the Laurentian Library (1934) and Panofskys
excursus on the facades of Domenico Becafumi of
1930, if not of Wolfin himself. It is not incidental
to note that the analytical drawings of San Lorenzo
were, for the Perspecta publication of 1971 drawn
by none other than Daniel Libeskind. There are, as
far as I can nd, few references to painting, to the
relations between architecture and painting, or to
the important introduction of Gestalt theory that
inected the treatment of mannerist facade design
in the second Transparency essay.
By implication, then, we might infer that to an
already powerful formal method, developed by
Rowe out of German art historical discourse, Slutzky
brought not only the sensibility of an abstract
painter but the intense theoretical interrogation of
gure and ground, surface and depth, an enquiry
already begun by Albers, but also in process in the
critical approaches of formal theorists such as Clem-
ent Greenberg. This Leger and Mondrian man
seems to have brought not only these modernists to
the table, but also Cezanne and, closer to Le Corbu-
sier, Ozenfantbut he brought them as surfaces
with depth, as experiments not simply in painterly
form, but plastic form as a whole.
If we then read Slutzky back from his later
writings to the Transparency essays, we might
infer that, to Rowes geometric understanding of
plan and facade and his layered comprehension of
this facade, Slutzky brought the innitely implied
and registered depth of the surface. Pierre Francas-
tel would write of Mondrian in 1948, speaking of
Composition in Red, Yellow, and Blue (1929), that
what at rst seems driven by a principle of absolute
regularity is driven rather by the principle of lateral-
ity, of nonstability. This space of Mondrian in real-
ity opens onto many imaginary spaces distinct from
the geometrical surface that carries the geometrical
signs. Place a Mondrian on a wall and immediately
it seems that the canvas organizes the surrounding
space in an entirely active way. The linear forms,
not symmetrically, lead the spectator dynamically to
geometrize the space. There is a kind of expansion
of the active value of lines and surfaces. It was
Slutzkys insight to bring such perceptions of the
abstract surface into architectural thought under-
standing that, as Francastel also asserted, all the
plastic arts are arts of space.
In later articles, Slutzky expanded on these
themes, developing his nuanced and concentrated
analyses of the relationship between painting and
architecture in the context of Le Corbusiers own
relations to cubism and purism.
But, although these early essays laid the foun-
dation for, and conrmed, Slutzkys enormous inu-
ence as a theorist and teacher in the Schools of
Architecture and Art at Cooper Union, they should
always be seen as direct outgrowths of his paintings
and designs. For Slutzkys paintings, in the senses
outlined in the Transparency essays, have always
been deeply architectural by implication, if not in
fact, with each painting a fundamental reworking
and advancement of these spatial concepts. In this
sense, his practice has been dedicated to exploring
all the implications of Van der Lecks assertion that
the description of time and space by means of per-
spective has been abandoned; it is the at surface
itself that transmits spatial continuity.
His most recent paintings reveal an entirely
new and radically reformulated spatial world, one
yet to be tested in architectural terms, but excit-
ingly suggestive for this generation of students
seeking alternatives to the ready-made digital vir-
tual worlds presented to them on software. In these
new paintings, we can detect the potential, not only
for the precise guration of ambiguity and layering,
transparency and opacity, virtual and literal, that
was proposed in the earlier works, but also some-
thing of the power of a suggested, if not, informe
form to destabilize yet again our commonplaces and
fetishes of late modernism. The scumbled brush
strokes, the oblique vectors, the outer edges left to
our imagination, the areas of dark space that pro-
ject an awareness not simply of Gestalt but also of
phenomenological psychology, operate well with our
present need for an escape from the preprepared
virtual, and provide us with spatial realms to explore
and fabricate even as they construct for us critical
paths by which to confront the atness of anime,
the hyperspaces of animation, the literal torques
and smooth warps of topological morphing pro-
grams. Slutzkys insistence, as Colin Rowe put it,
upon statements of atness as being provocative
of arguments about depth, has, in this context, a
special resonance that is equally dangerous and
explosive today as it was in 1955.
Robert Slutzky, Detail/Untitled, 40 2 40 in., 200001. Courtesy of
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Arthur A.
Houghton Jr. Gallery.
Robert Slutzky, Detail/Untitled, 48 2 48 in., 200001. Courtesy of
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Arthur A.
Houghton Jr. Gallery.