„Glass is clear at
least. Well, I mean some glass is clear. There is now the status-symbol
of un-clear, smoky glass windows in limousines so that the public cannot
see the important man inside.
Don’t you think the clarity of glass has probably been made for better wine over the centuries?
If we had no clear glass through which to admire the color, wine might have stayed simply dark and serviceable.
So hard, yet so breakable! And when broken, so dangerously sharp! So un-reparable!
It is only a little more than ten
years ago that scientists finally made glass a category of matter unto
itself. Before there were three states of matter, liquid, solid, and
gas. More and more clearly scientists came to understand, that glass is
most like a liquid; it does not have the molecular structure of a solid.
In fact, it is an extremely slow liquid. It is so slow, that the
universe can come to an end before the smallest motion of this liquid
can be detected, and therefore it cannot be called a liquid.
It is really no longer very good for
architecture, because when a bomb explodes the death by flying glass is
horrendous. We’ll probably soon have more defensive kind of
architecture.”
Jimmie Durham, 2006
