119-134

Regarding the liquidity of the boundary in contemporary architecture

Αρχιτεκτονική / Architecture

• Κωνσταντόπουλος, Ηλίας

The concept of interior-exterior space continuity has been a constant of contemporary architecture, from the first residences designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Illinois to Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Shigeru Ban’s Wall-less house. Modern times commence with the realization of Crystal Palace and with the utopian projects of the German “glass” expressionists, which paved the way for 20th century glass buildings. Crystal clear transparency was right from the start connected to modernity’s vision for an open society and a brave new world. Thus, glass buildings became the symbols of an architectural and social modernity which would bathe in light, literally and metaphorically, public and private life, in an unbroken continuum of interior and exterior space. Transparent houses and crystal skyscrapers, following Mies van der Rohe’s exemplar, dominated with their presence cities throughout the world for over a century.Transparency in modernism was not merely an aesthetic or functional necessity, but also a moral imperative. This fact is obvious in many public glass buildings, which project outwards a modern democratic image, such as Norman Foster’s Reichstag Dome in Berlin, or Tschumi-Photiades’s New Acropolis Museum. Architecture today, in its transition from modern “International Style” to globalized “Starchitecture”, adopts new liquid ways of form-making other than transparency, in order to achieve the same purpose, that of inside-outside continuity. Recent “allusive” projects, which withhold as much as they reveal, intimate their content indirectly, their interior being implied behind their misty outline. The current paper presents this paradigmatic change from 20th century liquid “interiority”, which resides in their glass facades, to the liquid “exteriority” of 21st century, which ensues from the manipulations of ground and folding surfaces.

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