Window Walls and Other Tricks of Transparency: Digital, Colonial, and Architectural Modernity

How did transparency become the settler colonial version of justice? Answering this question involves tracking some of the ways that transparency has become a technology of communication, a medium whose message is honesty, accountability, truth, and justice. This essay offers a short history of this new medium, which includes modernist architecture, networked data, dispossession through consultation, and a lot of dead birds. I put the Toronto Dominion Centre (1969), Canada's first and tallest wall of windows, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, into conversation with the "Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969," to consider how Canada's investments in architectural modernity mirror its investments in techniques, structures, and aesthetics of colonial governance and nonreciprocal transparency.