Welcome to the Glass Age

96 but ultimately lost to Piacentini’s neoclassicism. However, Il Vetro was one later addition to the ample debate of glass architecture as modern architecture, if not one of the last magazines to debate glass architecture before and during the Second World War. There is no easy answer for when the concept of glass architecture begins, contemporary critics tend to inscribe the beginning of glass architecture to the first decades of the 20th century; but Walter Benjamin in the 1920s studied a possible transition of glass as material to glass as architecture in the 19 th century. On the words of his notes of the incomplete project on the arcades of Paris: Glass before its time, premature iron. In the arcades, both the most brittle and the strongest materials suffered breakage; in a certain sense, they were deflowered. Around the middle of the past century, it was not yet known how to build with glass and iron [2]. Nevertheless, Glass has fascinated men over centuries way before any modern possibilities. Europe was dotted with colorful cathedrals, mirrored hallways and fogged greenhouses, and glass was used in artifacts and buildings all around the world without direct correlation to European arts and crafts. Figure 6.2. Lina Bo Bardi’s MASP. Source: Nelson Kon.