Reread Transparency

Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky had finished their essays about transparency in 1956, which provided a new vision on the works by Corbusier and divided the transparency as literal and phenomenal, Transparency, which won a high historical achievement, is one of the most important theories of modern architecture. Two authors used the Gestalt in the following Transparency â…¡, which claimed the transparency is the popular characteristic of many architectural works. Meanwhile, the development of educational reform experiment boomed at the University of Texas. During the 1940s and 1950s, Colin Rowe finished many important essays, laying the ideological basis of educational reform. Colin Rowe and Bernhard Hoesli put the form of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies Van der Rohe as the references system, offered the "Dom-ino" House and Space composition as the important diagrams, which revealed the fact that the Texas Rangers attached great importance to the topic of "Structure-Space". The Nine-Square Grid Exercise occurred at Texas, then the cube problem and the Juan Gris problem at Cooper Union. Hoesli continued his career at Texas, he created the "space within space" exercise and "space within space in context" exercise at ETH. He also provided the generalized transparency, trying to place the transparency to the area of architectural design methodology. Although the transparency is the paper of history research, however, it was closely linked to the architectural education at Texas. The theory of transparency also had a far-reaching influence on modern architectural education, and gradually obtained the characteristics of the architectural design methodology through the interpretation of a number of architects during the process of its development. This thesis tries to reveal this transformation by explaining the development of transparency, and to sum up its specific application in the architectural design as a kind of design methodology.The research process of this thesis could be divided as follows:The first chapter is the introduction part, which introduces the background of the research, the review on special information, and the research method of this thesis. The second chapter introduces some basic concept in the paper, concluding the origin of transparency, the concept of other discipline, and especially the division of literal transparency and phenomenal transparency by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky. The third chapter focuses on the essay transparency â…¡, analyzes the conceptual change of transparency II and transparency I, and questions the concepts of transparency â…¡. The fourth chapter expounds the relationship of transparency and design teaching, and its development in the design teaching. Mainly introduces teaching models which contain the thinking of transparency created by John Hejduk and Bernhard Hoesli. The fifth chapter starts from the concept of generalized transparency by Bernhard Hoesli, elaborates the transparency used in architectural design as a design methodology. The sixth chapter is a summary of the above contents, and put forward the expression of transparency based on contemporary architectural development.