Treacherous Transparencies

Treacherous Transparencies analyzes transparency as expressed in architecture and
art in an attempt to understand the intentions and objectives that underlie its use
by pertinent architects and artists.
This book looks at a few important works by selected artists and architects for whom
transparency is an artistic strategy, which they implement primarily with glass and
mirrors but with other media as well. The architects and artists brought together in this
context form an unlikely alliance: Bruno Taut, Ivan Leonidov, Marcel Duchamp, Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, Dan Graham, and Gerhard Richter. But they do have something in
common: their work marks salient way stations in the development of modernism up to
the present day.

Jacques Herzog, born in Basel in 1950, studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) from 1970 to 1975 with Aldo Rossi and Dolf Schnebli. He was a visiting tutor at Cornell University in 1983, has been a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1989 and since 1994, is a professor at ETH Zurich since 1999, and co-founded the ETH Studio Basel - Contemporary City Institute in 2002.