Project by Julian Krusic O'Donnell
Toledo, Ohio, the city that glass built, was surveyed as an industrial metropolis whose red brick streets, still intact, would outlive its promise. The city’s glass pavilion (Sejima 2006), unlike its midwestern counterpart, the Edith Farnsworth house, dwells as a mausoleum to an evaporated glass industry that supplied American modernism with its essential material. The Pavilion’s undulating, curved low-iron glass adopts high modernist models of transparency, but is in fact diaphanous, opaque, dim. Refractions steer the inverted retina, our species’ organ of fascination, inward.
To walk a mile from the pavilion is to enter real space, the space glass left behind. A new domestic panopticism is introduced into the de-developed suburbia, with the purpose of directing the gaze further inward, challenging spatial resolution, speaking of transparency but not like a transparent object. Polariscopic film expands the field of vision, and the position of the observer informs glass’s polychromy.
