Transparent problems: The glass state: the technology of the spectacle, Paris 1981-1998.

THE GLASS STATE: THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE SPECTACLE, PARIS 1981-1998.

By Annette Fierro, London: MIT. 2003, [pounds sterling]29.95

Annette Fierro is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and the stated topic of her book is 'the monumental glass buildings of contemporary Paris, most of which are in the program for the Grands Projets of Francois Mitterrand, president of France between 1981 and 1993' (she means 1995).

What interests Fierro are instances where, 'glittering in their glass skins and technological garb, Mitterrand's insistently transparent monuments present the beguiling desire to disappear, rather than to assert France's mythic presence'. Perhaps for that reason, the majority of Mitterrand's Parisian Grands Projets get very short shrift, while the glazed pavilions at Parc Andre Citroen (a City of Paris undertaking) are wrongly ascribed to him and much cited.

Buried deep in the text are the germs of what might have become an interesting study on the uses made of glass at the Cartier Foundation and the Institute of the Arab World by Jean Nouvel and the various contributions made to architecture in Paris by Rice-Francis-Ritchie and the late Peter Rice. Sadly, the author is so distracted by headier ambitions that basic facts are frequently ignored, misconstrued or scrambled. In discussing the Cite des Sciences at La Villette, for example, Fierro fails to appreciate that the project entailed the re-use of a redundant building nearly four times the size of the Pompidou Centre--a factor far from irrelevant to the nature of RFR's interventions there.

But if the book falls short of its primary goal--'the formation of a discourse of detail, where detail assumes a status typically accorded to other conventionally primary aspects ... in describing the entity of the architectural work', it does offer some surprises, not least Fierro's suggestion that Bernard Tschumi 'shares a cultural legacy and generational affinity with Piano and Rogers'--a notion that may well be entirely new to all three protagonists.