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It may just be the next big thing in condominium design. You might call it the New Transparency.
Everyone is already familiar with the Old Transparency. That's the aquarium-like effect of those floor-to-ceiling glass curtain-walls hung on the exteriors of most new condo towers these days. People buying into such high-rises, it appears, are comfortable with having their private lives on view through plate-glass windows.
I first got wind of the New Transparency in an article published a couple of Sundays ago in The New York Times. In this piece, reporter Penelope Green tells us about a new glass-walled condominium tower called W Downtown, slated to go up in 2009 in lower Manhattan's financial district. It is the handiwork of Jeremy Fletcher and Alejandra Lillo, designers busy in Berlin, Beijing and Los Angeles.
"Not only will the building's glass walls allow W residents to see, and be seen by, passersby on the street below," writes Ms. Green, "but Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Lillo have created peekaboo features within each apartment, like a window between the kitchen and the bedroom, and a bathroom that's a glass cube, allowing residents to expose themselves to their roommates and family members, too. The idea, Mr. Fletcher said, was to frame and exhibit the intimate details of life, or at least ones that would be aesthetically pleasing, 'like your silhouette in the shower.'"
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This design is clearly for people who are inclined to make all of life one non-stop performance. But is nothing sacred? A few skimpy scrims will be allowed in each apartment, says Mr. Fletcher, "so if you don't want your partner to see you shaving your legs in the shower, you can pull the shade."
Ms. Green links this design tendency to other phenomena in contemporary mass culture, such as the obsession with Internet social networking. "There is a behavioural connection," she writes, "between the unconsciously 'for show' lives of those living in glass condos and the consciously 'for show' lives of those spending more and more of their time online, where domestic activities are recorded in achingly specific detail. The result is a cultural confusion about private and public."
But if the New Transparency is very much part of today's culture, it presumably also has deep roots in the history of modernist architecture. Ms. Green quotes architectural critic Winifred Gallagher on the cultural shift that early modernism brought about in the way we live: "All of a sudden, we didn't want to be private and cut off."
Ms. Gallagher has a point, though it needs to be sharpened a bit. The early architectural avant-gardists in Europe were, by and large, also radical social reformers. They envisioned bright new cities freed from the curses of 19th-century Europe's urban centres: the damp, thick smog of industrial pollution; the ponderous, dirty masonry walls crowding in upon narrow streets.
To these architectural thinkers, glass was more than just another building material. It was a symbol of the city's glorious future, of unprecedented freedom and lightness. The "brick metropolis culture of today from which we all suffer" must be overthrown, argued the early 20th-century German fantasist and theorist Paul Scheerbart. "The only thing that can help us to do this is glass architecture, which must transform our whole life — the environment in which we live."
You never know, but I suspect Scheerbart and his friends among the modernist architects did not consider watching your partner take a shower to be quite the kind of liberation they had in mind. They were indeed sick of social and architectural conditions that made people "private and cut off."
But the new world of transparent walls they envisioned was less about exhibitionism than community, solidarity and a sense of social unity in the face of political oppression and economic disenfranchisement.
W Downtown's "freedom" never to have a private moment is something else. Frankly, I like the old avant-gardists' ideas about transparency better than the ones espoused by Mr. Fletcher and Ms. Lillo. (This may be partly because I know what my "silhouette in the shower" looks like, and it's not a pretty sight.)
But lest I be written off as the uncool curmudgeon I probably am, I hasten to add that Ms. Green is almost certainly right about some things: The boundary between private and public in our culture has surely been blurred by let-it-all-hang-out Internet chatting, and buildings like W Downtown are expressions of this new sensibility.
You might kick in other factors at work in the creation of architecture's New Transparency: the sexual revolution, tell-all confessionalism in all mediums, and even the "truth-telling" required by psychotherapy.
The New Transparency may be what's happening in Manhattan. Back home in Toronto, I still need doors to shut.
