| Transparency really becoming a popular theme in architecture was benefited from the technological progress after the industrial revolution, although it had been existed for a long time with colored glasses in church of the West as well as window paper in wooden buildings of the East. In modern architecture, transparency was mainly used to express space so that the solidity of building volume was hidden to manifest the importance of it. Afterwards people realized the problem of materials, construction and site, which were the main elements reflecting the reality, owned more significance to architecture in later-modernism. Translucency became a method of design as it was a kind of transparency but possessed texture features as well as opaque. It developed soon and became a common phenomenon both in some excellent works created by Master Architects and lots of unknown houses.The meaning of translucency has always been unclear, resulted in some confusions of it. Whereas transparency is characterized by visual openness and the direct transmission of light, and opacity results from the complete blockage or reflection of light, translucency is demonstrated by materials that capture, manipulate, and disperse light. In simplest terms, the adjective translucent is defined as allowing light to pass through while diffusing it such that objects on the other side are not clearly discernible. Translucent materials can create a hybrid condition, which is neither transparent nor opaque but may embody qualities of both. In addition, translucency can transmit a sense of aesthetic with distinctive light and vision.This idea of translucency, when deployed within windows, walls, and roofs, has, in recent decades, played an important role in expanding concepts of architecture beyond the orthodoxy of modernism and has contributed significantly to current innovations in contemporary architectural design. Today, among many of the contemporary designers whose work is defining early twenty-first-century architecture, there is a renewed interest in the building envelope as a site for experimentation and in translucency as an architectural effect.This study presents a series of architectural projects which explore various translucent possibilities in different ways, with the goal of deciphering the materials and methods of construction that contribute to each building being both practical and poetic. Another goal is to analyze the work of contemporary architects who engage the concept of translucence within a broader historical and conceptual context. The whole thesis contains about 39000 words,127 pictures and charts. |
