The idea of transparency in architecture relates to the idea of transparency in social, economic and cultural life. It attempts to abolish the sense of continuity of massive boundaries and sets off space as a continuous, uniform and open field of life. While transparency in architecture is incited by an idealistic, social pursuit, it is exclusively materialized with the technological advance of glass. The characteristics of glass [purity, visual penetration, an immutable, inert material], can -metaphorically – define to an extend as a base material. Glass allows visual contact, yet not transition. The exterior is not unified with the interior. On the contrary it becomes a part of it. Nature and the world are recomposed in the interior as a new scene.
The connection between transparency and architecture, is based on technology, and it becomes clear that in former times as in modern, technology is the one that sets the kind and extend of transparency that is attainable and enforces revisions in architecture in terms of mediation and medium. Transparency is also determined by social and cultural perceptions and habits, in a way that the ideal balance in transparency and opaqueness, unmasking and concealment, articulation and discretion, or even yet vulgarity and suppression, is unstable and fluid.