Conversant transparency

Abstract

Modernist conceptions of transparency combine the sensibility and metaphors of material properties of class with cubist structures of spatial perception to construct clarifying and equalizing facades. It is a unidirectional phenomenon to be observed. Similarly, the manufacturing based economy characteristic of modernism promoted the categorization of knowledge into discrete academic disciplines. In public high schools, this information was ideally presented through lecture form, the classic unidirectional flow of academic communication. As the economies of major US cities become increasingly service-based, public schools have also become sites of corporate intervention, blurring boundaries between commercial sectors and public sectors of the community. Urban high schools are responding by restructuring academic programming into networks of multidisciplinary academies that overlap a variety of learning methods. The thesis takes these cues to redefine transparency as an intensified negotiation between architectural and informational systems in which the observer becomes an integral agent in the transparent interchange.