What of opacity today ?

Groupe Architecture Principe, 
Eglise Ste. Bernadette-du-Banlay,Nevers,1963-66

Going back in the history of architecture, following a brief stay in the trees and in the caves: there is the wall. 
The wall and its manifold turns upon itself gave birth to the enclosure, the first protection against aggressions of all kinds. And the first expression of land ownership. 

We may consider, then, that the wall and its openings constitute the first among the initial principles of architecture, and the only one surviving today. 

The miracle is that, despite sociological and technological upheavals, it is omnipresent and dominant in the minds of those specializing in human settlement on the planet. It is therefore legitimate to raise the essential issue, that of opacity as the fundamental principle of architecture.

Indeed, in our times, aspirations to dominance are coming from two quarters. 

Transparency, through glass and its substitutes. Stretched membranes, which act as translucent surfaces or as sieves.

SANAA + Imrey Culbert, Louvre-Lens museum, Lens,2012

In arbitrating this confrontation, one criterion should be decisive: how to let solar light into inhabited places.

Architects thus automatically find themselves in charge of this arbitration, this choice. Through the artifices they invent, they determine how light is conducted.

Accordingly, they are free to determine the new fundamental of current architecture. The object of this debate between fundamentals is to formulate one’s preference, to state which manipulation should be used to arbitrate between opacity and transparency.

Claude Parent [ on Spéciale’Z , May 2012 ]