Architectures and Reflections

A fundamentally human work, where nothing escapes Man’s attention, the city governs certain of our behaviours through its physical structures and systems of organisation. We can thus consider space to be a physical constraint.

The appearance of glass in the urban landscape, not as windows but as claddings for buildings, brings several opportunities for eliminating, to a greater or lesser degree, the constraints imposed on Man by the city:

- In February 1994, Enric Franch, in Reflections on Space and Design, wrote concerning Muntadas: “by resorting to glass which provides a situation of transparency (.) Finally and above all, the evolution followed has revealed the essential part played by light: it is light that defines spaces; the contrast between an area in light and one in shadow shows up the boundaries between shape and substance, between the figure-space and the background-space, between space which is signified and space which is not.
This possibility opens the way to work within the limits of the architecture of empty space”.

Light, combined with glass, gives that mirror effect that we often see, creating enormous possibilities: how we can explore space within a finite space. The mirror, multiplying space from single to double, up to the infinite, allows us in certain cases to get rid of the unfriendly heaviness of the urban space. This solution could be applied to architectural creations of the 60’s to create an effect of illusions not mastered by Man:
- Nothing, indeed, escapes the attention of Man in the City, except perhaps the “virtual, contrived” dimension of the reflections created by a mirror. There then appears a dimension made of illusions, where everything is distorted. Curved shapes leap out that would be impossible for an architect to create. An image of what is behind us appears in front of us, albeit modified. We see something that does not exist, and we do not see what is actually before us (the “see without being seen” principle).

In this fictitious dimension, the pictorial effect occupies a very important position and has an undoubted aesthetic value. Shapes, and something very close to painting, appear at the same time as disturbing and quasi-anecdotal features: a skylight opening into a reflection of the sky, or the sky appearing in the middle of a building.

The architecture of a building with glass, this “mirror”, gives a certain structure to the reflected image of the building, most frequently in the shape of squares or rectangles. It forms a frame, a framework, for the minimalist features, composed of horizontals and verticals containing these images with their frequently curved contours.