Daniel Jütte

During my EURIAS fellowship, I will pursue a book project tentatively titled "Transparency: The Cultural History of an Idea." My key interest is to investigate how the experience of transparency became prevalent in Europe, and what the cultural, social, and economic repercussions of this development were. In other words, the book hopes to break new ground by exploring a phenomenon in Western history that was transformative on many levels, but which has received very little scholarly attention so far: the rise of architectural glass.

This historical investigation is inextricably linked to the question of whether the political and philosophical concept of "transparency"—a buzzword today, especially in more recent debates about good governance and the right to privacy—has concrete underpinnings in material culture. As a concept, transparency is now part of a global vocabulary; but on a material level, it first became a large-scale experience in Europe, especially from the seventeenth century onward. If we look at architectural traditions in two other highly advanced societies from the early modern period—namely, the Ottoman Empire and Edo Japan—we find what has been called a "largely glassless situation".

As this comparative perspective makes clear, the emergence of transparent glass in European architecture was by no means an inevitable development, but rather the result of specific cultural preferences that call for historical study. The book’s narrative is historical, but its methodology is transdisciplinary, and it will demonstrate the potential of crossing the boundaries between cultural history, material and urban history, and the history of art and architecture.

The book will begin with Roman times, when glass first was used for fenestration. However, the emphasis of my study will be on the period between 1300 and 1900—a period in which the fundaments were laid for the large-scale introduction of glass into private architecture. The final part of the book will be dedicated to the developments of the past two hundred years, as it was only in the nineteenth century that window glass came to be industrially mass produced—and, by extension, that transparency became a mass experience.