Nominal Transparency: Siting Government in Ireland

This essay considers several recent Bucholz/McEvoy-designed governmental buildings in Ireland as embodying a transformation in the architectural language of site-specificity: from contextualism (the attempt to relate a building to its physical context by engaging the language either of surrounding structures, or regional and national construction traditions) to an ecological model of site based on climate in which the civil servant is understood as an active customizer of his work space in relation to changing climatological conditions. The essay then traces out the political implications of this new model of labor that, since the 1960s, has increasingly positioned customization of environment as a form of worker “expression” that would stave off alienation, and coopt disruptive energies. Then, considering precisely what one sees and knows by having visual access to governmental decision-making processes in buildings like these in Ireland, the essay offers a critique of the longstanding equation—in architectural discourse—of architectural transparency (essentially glass facades or elevations) with political transparency. Evoking the famous Colin Rowe/Robert Slutsky concept of “phenomenal transparency” (the implied overlapping of figures, as opposed to the literal ability to see through surfaces), the essay argues ultimately that what an architecture of government can do is not so much embody any form of actual political transparency as emphatically name its need, an effect characterized as “nominal transparency.”