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A zine produced by members of ARCH 5602, Kean University School of Public Architecture

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Vol. 1

Letter from the Editor - 
Davis Richardson
Reclaiming 432 Park Ave - Kamila Diaz Calderon
Ultrathin Worlds - 
Anyi Liranzo-Payamps
Finance Over Function - 
Jared Britton
The Housing Shepherd - 
Kacper Kowal
Livestream Dystopia - 
Jake Haenggi
VR Architecture - 
Ryan Barbour
Metaverse Architecture - 
Danny Gavino
From Fi-Fi to De-Fi - 
Scott Gleason
Realistic or Reality? - 
Stephan Argent
Dubaifying Saudi Arabia- 
Rasha Labibidi
NEOM’s Sustainability Mirage - Andrew Lazarte
Living in the Model - 
Bryan Tome
Planting the Illusion - 
Lauren Taravella
Critical Regionalism - 
Nolan Aucone

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CGZ-VOLNO1-ARCH5602-FA2025-E2

Ultrathin Worlds: Transparency, Neoliberalism, and the Hidden Thickness of Contemporary Architecture
Anyi Liranzo-Payamps



In the last few decades, a specific, high-end look has taken over the world’s skylines and cultural districts. I call it the “ultrathin aesthetic.” It is a design language made of sparkling surfaces, glass enclosures that seem to disappear, and metallic planes so thin they look like they are made of paper. These buildings aim for a visual effect of total weightlessness, as if they are not even subject to gravity. You see it in the new luxury towers in Hudson Yards, the tech campuses in Silicon Valley, and the art museums popping up in European and Asian cities. This is not just a trend in “good taste;” it is the result of advanced structural engineering meeting global capitalism’s obsession with sleek, frictionless efficiency. But there is a massive, frustrating paradox at the heart of all this: the more transparent these buildings look, the more they hide.
   
The ultra-thin aesthetic is the material version of neoliberal ideology. It makes global systems of extraction, labor, and inequality look “natural” by turning architecture into a series of smooth, beautiful surfaces that cover the messy, heavy infrastructures supporting them. This architecture mirrors our digital world, the world of smartphone screens, and hidden supply chains. Looking at the work of firms like SANAA and using theories from Karl Marx, Beatriz Colomina, and Keller Easterling, we can see how “thinness” is a political tool. It is an architecture of erasure, where material complexity collapses into a seductive illusion of simplicity.
   
We must ask how we got so obsessed with making things thin. It did not happen in a vacuum; it is the culmination of decades of pushing materials to their absolute limit. Throughout history, at least until Modernism, buildings were often about mass—stone, brick, and heavy timber—but today, advances in glass manufacturing and steel engineering allow architects to chase “the edge.” We now have ultra-clear glazing that removes the green tint from glass, slender steel profiles that can hold up massive weights, and CNC-milled materials that fit together with zero visible joints. To understand why we love thin glass so much, you must look back at where this obsession started. Beatriz Colomina points out in X-Ray Architecture that modernism was born out of a fear of disease.1 Twentieth-century architects used glass and white walls because they wanted to fight tuberculosis, thinking sunlight and “clean” surfaces would cure people. But today, that “hygienic” look has shifted. We are not fighting TB anymore; we are trying to look “digitally clean.” The ultrathin aesthetic is like a giant architectural X-ray that shows nothing. It is a “hygiene” of the soul and the economy. By making everything look so transparent and clinical, we pretend that the “dirt” of the world—the poverty, messy politics, the trash—does not exist inside the glass box. When you walk into a SANAA building, you feel like you are in a vacuum. It is an artificial purity that makes you feel like the messy reality of the outside world has been removed.
   
As Colomina suggests, our buildings are starting to act more like screens than shelters. In the digital age, the boundary between physical and virtual space is getting thinner. Think about your smartphone: a sleek, glossy object that feels light in your hand that hides a massive, global network of data centers, undersea cables, and rare-earth mines. Ultrathin architecture does the exact same thing. It adopts the aesthetics of the “interface:” reflective, interactive, and seductively simple.2 When you stand in front of a building like the Rolex Learning Center, you are not really looking at a structure; you are looking at a giant, three-dimensional screen. It encourages us to be passive consumers of an image. We appreciate the “lightness” of the design instead of questioning what it took to get there. In the same way that we do not think about the labor conditions in a phone factory when we are scrolling through Instagram, we do not think about the “thickness” of the world when we are looking at a glass museum.
   
While these buildings supposedly privilege “openness,” the politics behind them tell a different story. Neoliberalism is characterized by deregulation and privatization—letting the free market run everything. This system loves to use the language of clarity and transparency to authorize systems that are exploitative. In this context, architectural transparency is just a metaphor. A glass facade suggests “honesty” because you can see through it, but it blocks you from seeing the truth of how the building functions. Keller Easterling talks about what she terms “extrastatecraft” and “disposition,” arguing that there is a “submerged” layer of global infrastructure—flows of labor, materials, and codes—that rarely shows up in the architectural photos we see in magazines.3 Ultrathinness is the perfect cover for these phenomena. The clean lines erase the traces of production. Think about the silica and rare minerals used in high-performance glass, the carbon-intensive processes needed to make “invisible” steel frames, and the low-wage workers who must keep these environments. The building looks immaterial specifically to hide the heavy materiality needed to sustain it.
   
Seen through a Marxist lens, there are three big problems that the “clean” look tries to hide. First, there is a total alienation of labor.4 The actual people who fabricate these high-tech, thin components are ghosts; their hard work is erased by the “perfection” of the joints and surfaces they spent hours perfecting. A worker on a construction site is struggling with a 500-pound sheet of glass, trying to set it perfectly so the architect can say it looks “effortless.” The more “effortless” a building looks, the more back-breaking labor likely went into it. Second is commodity fetishism, where we treat these massive buildings like shiny luxury gadgets. Obsessed with the “image” of the museum or the office tower, the social relationships or the human sweat that built the place are completely forgotten. Clean lines are only clean because someone spent hours scraping away excess glue and polishing the edges. Finally, there is the ephemerality of it all. This “lightness” vibe perfectly dovetails into a capitalist culture obsessed with constant consumption. Because the buildings look so thin and temporary, it reinforces the idea that nothing is permanent —which is exactly what the market wants, so it can keep building, tearing down, and rebuilding in an endless cycle. It is the “planned obsolescence” of architecture.
   
If you want to see this in action, you must look at the Japanese firm SANAA. Their work, such as the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion, is incredibly beautiful. It is serene, light, and looks like a dream, but it is also full of contradictions. Take the Glass Pavilion in Toledo: it is a series of rounded glass rooms that look radically open, but to make this envelope work, they engineered robust climate control systems.5 Glass is a terrible insulator. To keep people from freezing or baking, they must hide massive amounts of equipment within the floors and ceilings. The illusion of “effortlessness” is sustained by expensive, heavy technology.
   
Another example of this tension is SANAA’s renovation of La Samaritaine in Paris.6 They installed a massive, wavy glass facade in the middle of a historic neighborhood. The undulating glass does not “reflect” the older buildings; it distorts them, turning the history of Paris into a blurry, watery image on a screen. This is a (quite literal) example of the “erasure of the local.” The building does not care about its stone neighbors or the history of the street. It is a “universal” style that could be anywhere. It is a high-end retail space for luxury goods where architecture acts as a wrapper for a giant commodity. The “thinness” of that glass wave is the visual equivalent of a luxury shopping bag. It looks expensive and tells you that if you cannot afford what’s inside, you do not belong there.


Sketch abstracting SANAA’s La Samaritaine, generative AI underlay plus digital sketching by author



The biggest irony of all is the environmental footprint. A building that looks like it is barely there—invisible—is often an ecological burden. The production of ultra-clear glass is a massive energy sink because of the intense purification process needed to make it clear. Most glass has a green tint because of iron; removing that requires a lot of energy and involves mining specific types of high-purity sand from riverbeds in places like Southeast Asia, destroying local ecosystems in the process.7 Then the issue of the building’s operational energy usage itself: the thinner you make a wall, the lower its thermal resistance and the less it protects the interior, so the mechanical systems and AC must work double-time to prevent wild temperature swings. In a project like the Rolex Learning Center, massive windows allow in a ton of heat. To keep the “ethereal” vibe, you cannot have big, ugly AC units hanging off the side of the building; the tech is hidden underground. Additionally, there is a maintenance grind. Since even a tiny bit of dirt or a small crack can ruin the illusion of purity, these buildings need constant, expensive cleaning and repairs. It is a never-ending cycle of upkeep, usually handled by a hidden workforce—often low-wage immigrant labor—that remains invisible to the people using the building, all just to keep up the appearance of lightness.
   
Ultrathin architecture is a global “smoothness” that erases local identity in favor of a universal, frictionless style. It is what Fredric Jameson calls the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”8 This smoothness is a tool for developers to project an image of “modernity” that overrides local history. It is the visual language of gentrification. When you see a sleek, thin glass building go up in a neighborhood, you know exactly what is coming: higher rents and the displacement of the people who made that neighborhood what it was. In the end, we must realize that what looks transparent is the screen; what looks weightless is held up by invisible labor; what looks “clean” is ecologically heavy. We should not just look at these buildings; we need to read them across different scales. Looking at this seductive minimalism, we can start to see—and challenge—the actual power structures that shape our world. We need to stop melting “all that is solid into air” and start looking at the solid reality beneath the surface.


  1. Colomina, Beatriz. X-Ray Architecture. Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019. 
  2. Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2000.
  3. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso, 2014.
  4. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin Classics, 2002 (Originally published 1848).
  5. Sejima, Kazuyo, and Ryue Nishizawa. SANAA: Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, 2011-2018. Edited by Agustín Pérez Rubio. Madrid: El Croquis, 2018.
  6. Ibid.
  7. Jaque, Andres. December 2019 - Collectivity, “Blue-Sky Urbanism: The Socio-Territoriality of Ultra-Clear.” e-flux Architecture. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/collectivity/304248/blue-sky-urbanism-the-socio-territoriality-of-ultra-clear
  8. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 199