We weighed up the title of the initiative. We introduced the ampersand (&) to indicate the close alliance between architecture as a whole and the prerogative of transparency. After paying attention to the subtitle (“Cycle of meetings with international designers on the subject of architecture”). That is to say, in short, that the glassblock division of the multinational company Seves has really intended to promote this cycle of meetings, and with that very ambition.

Glassblock is called “mattone di vetro” in Italian and it may well be that the birth of the name coincides with the debut, in around the ninth decade of the 19th century, of the individual piece, of the hollow pressed glass tile, to be manufactured by the glassworks and inserted into architecture in functional and/or decorative series.

A personal opinion: the salient moment in the history of the tile that was destined to evolve into the glassblock - that is, the modern, contemporary product that is valid for service spaces and served spaces, open and closed places - was the time when, in who knows what Parisian bistro, Viennese architect (in exile in Paris) Adolf Loos turned to Le Corbusier (Swiss, by then transplanted into Paris, capital of construction moderne and of Art Deco) and confided in him:… Civil man, who works in an office or a workshop, must have all possible natural lighting, and yet it would be convenient for him not to be seen working.
L-C reports these words in Urbanisme (1925) and adds that, for Loos, the solution to this dichotomy is through the adoption of polished, translucent yet opaque glass. Was it, in his view, the forerunner of the radically modern construction?

From 1925 onwards, L-C was to use the glass block more than polished glass tiles; mainly the “Nevada” glass block, which he was to fit in large panels of glass and cement, known as “vetrocemento” [concrete-framed glass blocks], to fill the openings in the structural grids of reinforced concrete.

Although indifferent to Le Corbusier’s poetics, Pierre Chareau was to use “Nevada” glass blocks in considerable quantities to create the iron-framed glass panels in the “Maison de verre” - a work that would become legendary.

There is one fundamental difference between L-C’s pan de verre and the curtain wall of the architects of International Style: one is translucent yet opaque, the other is “more or less” transparent, depending on the morphological characteristics of the frames and the glass sheets.

The glass block industry was to become established worldwide, especially in the nations with a Rationalist architectural orientation, despite the appeal of transparency. As in the peculiar appeal of iron and glass architecture, in the sublime version offered by Mies van der Rohe. Mies always preferred the large glass surface to the measured panels of concrete-framed glass blocks.

Without needing to look back over the whole thrilling story that would see the transition from pan de verre to the construction system proper, cf. the Maison Hermès in Tokyo by Renzo Piano and Seves (2000), it is clear that transparency is the thorn in the side of the production and use of glassblock.

Yet we are certain that Seves is not unaware of which and how many metaphoric values transparent architecture, the transparent architecture of the city and the territory, will come to take on. We are sure that it will remove the thorn, take up the challenge (and other production challenges), and enable vertical, horizontal, curved, transparent and nearly transparent walls (that will automatically appear light) to be built; this without foregoing the recognised, traditional, 20th-century - so to speak - qualities of the glass block.

In the subtitle there is a hint of praise for international designers. Please make no mistake: authentically international designers, authors, not archistars. Etymologically autore [author] and aumentare [to augment/increase] have the same root: indeed it is to be hoped that authors increase art, technique and research in home design in various ways. It is not clear what archistars do.

Tonight, on this beautiful metropolitan evening on the threshold of summer, the authors, Moneo and Brock, Belén and Jeff, will illustrate the Tiberio Spa Resort in Panticosa (recently built in the Aragonese Pyrenees), a work that already occupies a special place in that glimpsed unitary building that is all made of glassblock architectures.

Vittorio Savi