Johan Wijesinghe



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Architecture of a Transparent Frontier


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“When you separate materials as a way of looking at architecture—wood, steel, concrete, fabric — projects constructed out of glass seem to resist such classification. They operate as an anti-material, one without fixed character, an empty image. Glass wants to be something it cannot be by itself.”¹

My thesis explores the exaggerated characteristics of transparency in architecture, questioning how transparent materials interact with time, gravity, and environmental conditions. The study examines how the overuse and misuse of transparency introduce a distorting tension between spaces—an artificial effect achieved through lenses, atmospheric conditions, and climatic shifts. This investigation positions transparency not as a neutral medium, but as an active force that challenges architectural boundaries, ultimately destabilizing what Kipnis calls the "hegemony of the object" by dissolving seams, edges, and surfaces.

Rather than reinforcing form as a primary architectural concern, my research shifts focus to the building’s surface, engaging in a discourse on order and disorder, mass and surface, precision and instability. The approach builds on the postmodern critique of transparency emerging in the early 2000s, following a lineage of glass architecture from Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House to Kazuyo Sejima’s Louvre Lens. Rejecting the modernist fixation on transparency as clarity, my work engages the unstable, ephemeral, and imprecise aspects of digital fabrication, framing transparency as an instrument of disruption rather than resolution.

The Thermal Bathhouse: A Study of Layered Transparency:


The thermal bathhouse in Liepāja, Latvia, serves as a testbed for these ideas, critically engaging the complexity of ambiguous thresholds. Here, extreme nature and urbanism converge, exposing privacy as an architectural dilemma. Traditional bathhouse typologies—whether Latvian, Finnish, or Roman—reinforce gender segregation through spatial separation, resulting in horizontally layered, often inefficient sequences. My thesis challenges this horizontality by densifying and stacking spaces, experimenting with layered atmospheres that manipulate opacity, veiling, and translucency.

This architectural strategy reframes transparency not as a condition of openness but as a material of controlled perception. Filters and layered enclosures produce gradations of visibility, responding to both cultural constructs of privacy and the environmental context. By stacking and intersecting programs, the project subverts the traditional transparent object, creating a nuanced spatial experience where transparency becomes both ambiguous and performative.

In doing so, this work positions transparency as an unstable architectural condition, no longer bound by modernist ideals of purity and legibility. Instead, it exists as a materialized distortion—shifting, layered, and continuously redefined by its environmental and social contexts.


References

  1. Riley, Terence. Light Construction. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996.
  2. Mies van der Rohe, Tugendhat House, Prague.
  3. K. Sejima (SANAA), Louvre Lens, Lens, France.
  4. Kipnis, Jeff. Introduction. The Light Construction Reader, ed. Todd Gannon. New York: Monacelli, 2002.
  5. Lynn, Greg. "Probable Geometries: The Architecture of Writing in Bodies." ANY Magazine, no. 0 (May–June 1993): 44–49. JSTOR.
  6. The sauna culture in Latvia and the Baltic region, influenced by Finnish and Russian traditions, contrasts with the larger, more ornate Roman bathhouses. Despite differences, these traditions share common gender constructs and spatial segregations, shaping the architecture of bathing spaces.






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