Transparency: The Material History of an Idea by Daniel Jütte (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Transparency: The Material History of an Idea by Daniel Jütte
• Kjetil Fallan (bio)

Transparency: The Material History of an Idea By Daniel Jütte. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. 512.

The scope of Daniel Jütte's material history of the idea of transparency is daunting and might at first seem excessively so. Covering antiquity to the present, and with no clear-cut geographical demarcation, the study is instead defined by a single idea and a single material. Immediately narrowing it down further to equate glass with plate glass, or more precisely glass windows, and declaring that the idea of "transparency first and foremost has been an architectural experience" (p. 6), the project takes on more manageable—but no less impressive—dimensions. For students of material culture, this quick sidelining of nonarchitectural vitreous transparency (think of eyeglasses, drinking vessels, lighting fixtures, etc.) can appear slightly dismissive but ultimately comes off as justifiable in the name of coherency and clarity of argument.

A key ambition of this book is to problematize the teleological bent of conventional narratives of how glass windows became a defining feature of our built environment. This is pursued chiefly by reconceptualizing the historical development of architectural glass as a complex movement of ebbs and flows, of fits and starts, of forces and counterforces. It is a long and winding road Jütte guides us along. Technological advances in the production of plate glass are given due attention, but the book places greater significance on the social, aesthetic, and material values assigned to glass when explaining its changing status. We learn that when glass was first used to seal windows in ancient Rome, it was a niche product primarily applied in bath houses, where it was particularly important to let light in without letting heat out. But it was a very different kind of building that for centuries would become the main arena for the discourse on architectural glass: the church. In explaining the extraordinary role of glass windows in church architecture, Jütte turns to the dogma of "divine light" in Christian theology. Crucially, the function of glass windows in churches was to let that light into the room, not to provide views of the outside. The equation of architectural glass with transparency in the metaphorical sense would have to await the emergence of glass windows one could actually see through, as well as the increasing articulation of "openness" as an intellectual ideal from the Reformation to the Enlightenment onward. Jütte navigates these open waters in confident and convincing ways, and he skillfully draws on a vast array of source material, from travelogues and architectural treaties to poetry and marketing material.

One of the book's great strengths is the way it shows how the architecture of transparency generated as much anguish and anxiety as it delivered on its promise of health, happiness, and enlightenment. A particularly fine, but sinister, example of this is the chapter discussing how glass architecture has [End Page 711] served totalitarian regimes with the same fervor as it has democratic ones, turning insight into surveillance and outsight into exposure (ch. 14). In short, transparency is just as ideologically promiscuous as is modernist design itself.

Transparency is primarily a history of Western culture. Brief excursions to select "non-Western" locations in pre- and early modern times serve as reminders that glass was not always and everywhere the obvious, or even preferred, window-sealing technology. These prompts function well as counterpoints in the general argument that it was a range of social, cultural, religious, economic, technological, and ecological reasons that eventually established the primacy of architectural glass as both material and metaphor of transparency in, and ultimately beyond, Europe. However, throughout the book, the geographical focus remains fairly narrow, with examples rarely venturing outside (present-day) Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Britain. Given that Jütte points out that "glass architecture has become a global phenomenon" (p. 383), it would have strengthened his argument if the four final chapters, which deal with the nineteenth century to the present, had drawn on a more diverse sample of case studies, including for instance the function and meaning of...