ABSTRACT
Glass was thought to appear immaterial and therefore utopian. Yet dust and dirt, as well as reflection and translucency, betray the invisibility of glass. An invisible necessity, air cultivates the non-specular aspects of architecture: the transmission of sounds, smells, atmospheric conditions and tension through space. The Large Glass and the Maison de Verre were, in part, responses to the particular atmosphere of Paris in the early twentieth century. Fresh air, although disapproved of into the nineteenth century, was by the turn of the twentieth century, firmly linked to good health. The First World War stifled the new Parisian open air culture. The maintenance of internal privacy and control of air interchange at the Maison de Verre, if not wholly successful in functional terms, signified a complex spatiality of another sort. The glass walls of the Maison de Verre envelope its air. Despite lack of formal openings in front façade, other gaps are present in the interior as minuscule lines.
