Towards A GLASS HOUSE (inverted) ( in green) Vers UNE MAISON DE VERRE (a l'envers) (en vert) 1990


W. Jude LeBlanc in association with Starling Keene

You believe in a crystal palace that can never be destroyed--a palace at which one will not be able to put out one's tongue or make a long nose on the sly . And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this edifice...

And so hurrah for underground.
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
Notes From Underground

Introduction
The Clean Machine in the Garden, Parts I and II

Orthodox and revisionist histories of modern art and architecture weave various scenarios that describe and attempt to explain relations between separate disciplines--art/architectural history, economics (implications of mechanized production), and politics.

The construction of both modern building and theory has been contingent on numerous advances in building construction. The near total mechanization of the building industry that continues to affect all scales of production and assessment is well known. Rolled steel resulted in framing larger spans and heroic cantilevers. Elevators resulted in taller buildings. The automobile resulted in distant, fully autonomous placement of these erect and brave new buildings. Finally, glass resulted in larger sealed apertures. These technical developments combined with an aesthetic sensibility that privileged a centripetal over centrifugal composition. The whole resulted in a spatially open architecture that blurred clear demarcations between inside and outside, public and private, and most significantly nature and culture.

The Machine in the Garden. The Farnsworth house, a domestic paradigm of early modernism, seemed evidence that the compelling myth of the 'machine in the garden' could be realized in built form. Inevitabilibly, we would discover contradictions between aspirations offered by the myth of the machine in the garden and actualities found within models such as this. First, a general faith that mechanization might remove material inequities and result in material surplus--a new Eden--has yet to be realized. Second, the notion of a clean machine operating as a benign font of industrial material (consumer goods) within the larger structure of a supporting ecosystem underestimated the pollution created by existing and developing technologies.

The Farnsworth house persists as a compelling typological model utilizing glass as the major enclosing material. However, as a model relevant to the current production of housing it is lacking on three counts. First, the land use proposition is not sustainable and it is self-polluting. Secondly, a completely open house placed in the round necessitates a huge amount of land in order that privacy is adequately maintained. Since such a house resists placement in proximity to another, the larger public space of a shared community is rendered impossible to construct. Finally and fundamentally, because of the entropic reality of current exploitative technologies the myth of the machine in the garden suffers credibility. It is conceivable and likely that technological developments in the near future could make the all glass building workable. Present applications of building technology should be evaluated by the degree to which they contribute to sustaining an ecologically sound environment.

Prism Purist
The image of the cube of glass is given.
It remains singular and beautiful. Before we criticize this construction we accept it. The glass cube exists as an approximation of an Euclidean matrix. Glass walls stand vertical as we do, as cousins to Homo Erectus, upright against the horizon. Likewise, nominally vertical planes converge to the center of the earth and nominally horizontal planes are concentric to the earth's center. The glass cube results as a measured response to perception.

How might one build a transparent house that is aware of the earth and to community? So began this inquiry as a response to the intrinsic difficulties--one technical and one social--posed by the fashioning of a house of glass. Practical problem solving led to the proposition that the apriori image of the cube of glass upon the earth give way to that of a plane of glass enfronting lifted earth. At the exterior, the glass house becomes an image of itself. Its content is further reflected inward in the glass spine that divides the space and provides for the enactment of daily life.

The building is composed of double wall concrete block and poured in place concrete with steel and glass infill. The plan is bifurcated in the long dimension by a glazed parallelepiped, open to the sky. The primary element is a steel triple-hung glazing unit, three feet wide by ten feet tall, that acts variously as window, as handrail, and as door. The exact central axis of the house is occupied by five typical glazed sections of four triple-hung units. When this glazed wall dividing the plan is repeated two feet to the north and again to the south, the result is a threshold which is itself divided. This glass case alternately functions--as a spatial screen, as a display cabinet, as a habitable wall--to divide, connect or reflect one half of the house with the other.

Passive Solar Efficiency
Oh for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!

- pool excavation provides earth needed for north facing berms
-earth berm-- more constant temperature of earth provides insulation
-southern glazing--maximizes solar gain in winter
-Trombe wall
--maximizes solar gain winter, radiation
--cools house in summer, convection current increases air circulation
-deciduous trees and retractable shading devices in the window wall screen sun in summer

Site Plan: Community and the Street

The glass house pressed into the earth results in a configuration that can accept proximate placement. A successful neighborhood is made possible by articulating divisions between public and private areas by designing controlled sight lines. The site plan configuration shows a double row of L-shaped houses that result in the articulation of public and private outdoor spaces. The public spaces consist of the front yards that define the space of the street, and an internal semi-private mews and lap pool which provides a pedestrian shortcut through the block. The private outdoor areas are side yards conceived as extensions of the interior space of the respective houses.

Frames and Light

The interiors are lit naturally by the glazed vertical plane of the south facing window wall, the upright light monitors to the north, and the horizontal stripe of glass block that divides the plan at center. The triple hung sash is repeated to form a glazed plane. The glazed plane is repeated to form the boxed glass spine.

The triple hung sash as a framing device is a practical guillotine. Close and far views of landscapes and interior tableaux are afforded through flexibilities in lighting and placement. The long thin glass spine can variously be made transparent to light (window), reflective to light (mirror) and transmitive of light (sunlight, artificial light, television, etc.)

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ARCHITECTURE


Casita Garcia

Ellis House

Twentieth Century Veterans Memorial

Iceland House

Baton Rouge Cimetiere

Two More Scupper Houses

Dogtrot Scupper House

Shotgun Scupper House

Wall-Highway

Wall-Mask

Wall-Perimeter

Public Space In The New American City

Free Bridge

Goldstein Studio

Another Glass House Competition

Louisiana House

Origlio/Vanderbilt Condominium