Transparency has long symbolized openness, continuity, and freedom in architectural thought. Yet, contemporary architecture reveals a more ambivalent condition, in which transparency enables and destabilizes wandering and emptiness traditionally associated with the flâneur and non-centered spatial experience. This paper argues that transparency operates less as a visual property than a spatial condition that produces apparent indeterminacy while pre-structuring experience through exposure, legibility, and visual saturation. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s flâneur, Roland Barthes’ concept of the empty center, and critical discourse on transparency, the paper investigates how transparent architectures generate visual fields that invite movement and multiplicity while constraining concealment, withdrawal, and unpredictability. The study employs a qualitative visual-spatial methodology based on comparative analysis of architectural drawings, photographs, and spatial sequences, focusing on visibility regimes, user positioning, and degrees of exposure. Three seminal case studies are selected for their distinct articulations of transparency across modern and contemporary contexts: Mies van der Rohe’s Neue Nationalgalerie, SANAA’s Rolex Learning Center, and Sou Fujimoto’s House NA. Each represents distinct formal and spatial strategies of transparency. The analysis demonstrates how openness oscillates between invitation and control, producing spaces that appear non-hierarchical yet remain highly regulated through visual access. Rather than opposing transparency to wandering and emptiness, the paper reframes transparency as an unresolved tension that transfers responsibility for meaning, use, and self-expression onto the user. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing debates on architectural experience and ethics of openness.

Authors:
Amos Bar-Eli, Holon Institute of Technology, Israel

About the Presenter(s)
Mr Amos Bar-Eli is a University Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at HIT - Holon Institute of Technology in Israel

See this presentation on the full schedule – Tuesday Schedule

Bookmark