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R.M. Villa:
"Architecture of the Diaphanous";
Talk: Sophistication: In "lieu" of statements, "articulation", TU Wien; 2018-11-08 - 2018-11-10.

Both the architecture and the philosophy developed in the Middle-Ages share a peculiar approach to the question of transparency. As the Abbot of St. Denis reforms his church by emplacing never-seen-before glass windows, philosopher Averroes compares the functioning of the human intellect to the translucency of a diaphanous crystal. By looking both at the architecture and at the architectonics of transparency as a "third space", it is possible to provide a novel reading to a set of modern concepts such as the one of subject, of rationality and of tradition. This "device of transparency", forged way before the time of Renaissance and Enlightenment, is then perhaps an interesting key through which it is then possible to better understand the Modern Era, and by extension the contemporary (or "post-modern") condition.

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