ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the most contested aspect of Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky's essay of 1963 titled "Transparency, Literal and Phenomenal": the close relation it posits between modern architecture and cubist painting, using Le Corbusier's Villa at Garches as a paradigm. The transparency, openness, and lightness of iron structures are seen as metaphors of modern life: "Fields overlap, walls no longer define streets, the street has been transformed into a stream of movement. Rail lines and trains, together with the railroad station, form a single whole there is only a great, indivisible space in which relations and interpenetrations reign". The two types of transparency are illustrated by paintings by Moholy Nagy and Fernand Leger, respectively that are, literal transparency figures are realistically represented as consisting of a translucent material such as glass. Phenomenal transparency, figures are represented as semi-opaque and the hidden part of a recessive object is suggested rather than stated.
