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c h a p t e r 2 The Domain of Echo Lyric Audiences Technological advances in the use of glass have facilitated compelling architectural experiments that transform the relationship between a building and its audiences, complicating the latter’s perceptions of the edifice and representations of their own presence within it. In particular, in so-called curtain wall design , the exterior enclosure is attached like a curtain to the structural frame of concrete or steel; that enclosure’s independence from its structure enables experiments with the properties of glass. Many contemporary architects, notably Cesar Pelli, have triumphantly pursued those potentialities, but no better examples of such achievements in design—and no examples more relevant to the audiences of early modern lyric poetry—can be found than recent edifices by Renzo Piano and Jean Nouvel. Although both were previously known largely for their buildings abroad, of late they have received important commissions in the United States. Piano’s include additions to the Morgan Library in New York City, the High Museum in Atlanta, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and he is the architect for the new headquarters for the New York Times. Nouvel ’s Guthrie Theater recently opened in Minneapolis.1 In his high-rise edifice on Macquarie Street in Sydney, Piano giftwraps in glass the bricklike terracotta he so often uses in his buildings, creating the transparency and immateriality he celebrates when writing about architecture. Similiarly , the Morgan Library juxtaposes glass with stone and steel. If transparency “is very important on the plane of poetic language”2 in the senses of “poetic” Piano apparently intends (expressiveness, intensity, and so on), it also, with apt paradoxes , introduces ontological opacities very germane to poetry. Is the space between the terra cotta and the glass within or without the edifice? Is the viewer on Macquarie Street who is reflected in the glass, or the diner sitting in front of it at an outside table of the café, inside or outside the building? In like manner, as one faces the far wall in the court of the Morgan Library, one wonders whether the images one glimpses are representations of activity on the street behind it or reflections from another wall behind the viewer; louvers with panels of glass visible between them can further complicate this play of images. As these effects suggest, Piano’s glass confounds the planes in many of his buildings; “we have often created spaces with multiple and successive vertical planes,” he writes of his work, and the observer is likely to encounter multiple reflections of herself, occupying different planes.3 Even more tantalizing are the questions raised by similar techniques in Jean Nouvel’s Cartier building in Paris. On one level, when he replaced the stone wall that had previously cut off the surrounding gardens with a glazed screen, he opened up the space to those outside it. At the same time, however, he also opened up intriguing issues: the building itself is surrounded by two glazed screens that are considerably larger than the structure itself, and reflections also play off some walls within the structure, so when trees or viewers or inhabitants appear in the glass, it is impossible to tell what is inside and what is not, which reflections come from denizens and which from observers, and indeed, where the building should be said to begin and end. Enigmas are the principal plants in these gardens. Glass, Piano, and Nouvel demonstrate, not only teases and troubles in the way mirrors can do but delights in adding the additional complication of a claim to transparency that is itself far from transparent: neither simply true nor simply mendacious. A particularly intriguing expression—and expansion—of these techniques and the issues they raise is Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Numerous enlarged photographs of earlier stage productions are reproduced with ghostly faintness on a material like air-mail paper that adheres to the stone walls; a huge representation of the Weird Sisters who haunted Macbeth, for example, haunts those walls as well. Especially apropos of my purposes, however, is the variation on that technique in the café on Level 5: the images from the plays appear not on stone but on back- and front-lit mirrors, so that the viewer sees her own reflection among those of the characters in the represented scenes. Thus the past of the theater merges with its present, spectators interact with actors...

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