ABSTRACT
The translucent resonance, understood as a metaphor, is physically and conceptually revealed in many works of contemporary architecture, in both projects and the perceptive or lived experience. Between the transparent/clear/evident and the opaque/dark/non-evident, the translucent is evoked, drawn, and imprinted in today’s architecture in its different degrees of simultaneity, resonance, and perceptibility in time, space or condition; while becoming an in-between or interstitial realm – that which is in the middle, the in-between – of coexistence, mixture, imprecision and ambiguity, more or less literal, concrete or homogeneous. Its intrinsic in-between and figural condition, implicit in the concepts of imprecision, complexity, superposition, multivalence, instability, interaction, tension and limit, suggests abandoning the strict and direct legibility of the perception of the architectural object at the level of structuring, space-form and use-functionality. Among the formal and perceptual visibilities, invisibilities, reflections, refractions and diffractions, we find, as inspiration or basis, the phenomenological effect of the translucent of Kipnis, the Image-flow of Buci-Glucksmann, the three transparencies of Ito, the suspension-between of Sloterdijk, or the Large Glass of Duchamp, announced as “in-between translucent spatialities and perceptibilities” that are increasingly more evident in daily life and in the contemporary cultural paradigm. As evoked by Deleuze’s zone of indiscernibility, the translucent resonance of contemporary architecture is presented as a borderline place with imprecise boundaries between figures and backgrounds, identities and differences, being and becoming, veiled and unveiled, sayable and unsayable; a place-limit (literal, conceptual or poetic), intentionally affective in its simultaneousness between transparency and opacity in time, space and perception. It is the “finally flexible contemporary transparency,” as Nouvel calls it, which interstitially undraws the formal boundaries of the architectural box and is spatially expanded in evanescence between what is real and what is virtual.
