In addition to managing the flow of people in the spaces of the museum in order to maximize freedom of movement and choice, Irwin also modified the industrial window grids to create perceptual ambiguity, placing transparent glass in the inner four panes while using frosted glass for the outer panes. With this, Irwin solved the problem of either having the windows become a wall of glaring light, if all transparent glass was used, or having them become a claustrophobic muffling of space, if all frosted glass was used. Irwin's windows catch the eye in a back and forth oscillation between distant and proximal focus.
It is unusual to find such mismatched elements on a single facade as this fine stonework coexisting with these stained and rotting shutters, on a house in the fortified town of Feltre, in the northern Italian province of Belluno.
Where considerable labour lies behind the cutting and fitting of the stone, the timber planks have been left in their raw state, with no paint or carved decoration. Even the iron hinges are of the plainest variety.
Take the use of enormous plate windows...they deprive our buildings of intimacy, the effect of shadow and atmosphere. Architects all over the world have been mistaken in the proportions which they have assigned to large plate windows or spaces opening to the outside. We have lost our sense of intimate life, and have become forced to live public lives, essentially away from home.
Arturo Soria y Mata, who proposed a linear streetcar suburb for Madrid in 1882 and managed to build something like three miles’ worth of an intended thirty. Likewise, the project by Edgar Chambless for Roadtown, published in 1910, depicted an infinitely long, two-room-wide building atop three levels of underground rail lines for express, local, and freight traffic. In the late 1920s, N. A. Miliutin proposed a Soviet Union–spanning linear plan that—following Soria y Mata’s rhetoric—would have solved the old Marxian chestnut of city/country contradiction at a stroke. Le Corbusier’s Algiers scheme of 1933—a highway-topped fourteen-story building meant to stretch miles along the Mediterranean and house 180,000 people—was surely the most immediate precursor of Rudolph’s “City Corridor.”