Abstract
Realizing his idea of ″anti-object,″ Kengo Kuma adopts structural glass excessively for the lounge in the Water/ Glass House from the level of furniture pieces to the level of architectural elements including the floor. In order to understand the cultural significance of Kuma′s idea of ″anti-object″ that relies on the refractive and reflective qualities of glass, this paper adopts two references: minimalism in art during the 1960s that criticized the status of the object and focused instead on materiality per se, and the phenomenology of thingness that criticized the object and that reinstated the intimate bond between man and the thing. Introducing these two references, this paper shows that the glass floor in the lounge of the Water/ Glass House oscillates between two states: the aesthetic sensuousness for the glass′ reflective and refractive materiality, and thingness for its ethical role as the floor that upholds silently human dwelling activities. While illuminating this conflictual dialectic between the two states, this paper argues that the aestheticism of material celebration should not stand on its own only to eclipse the thingly performance of an architectural element; rather, the former should be sublimated into the latter.
