Architecture week - Paul Finch on why transparency does not guarantee a clearer view

''I can see right through you"; but transparency is not always a mark of approval. Yet in recent years, a cult of transparency has emerged within government and business. Inevitably, it has spread to architecture and buildings, and London has the newest example: "City Hall", the headquarters for Ken Livingstone and the London Assembly, designed by Foster & Partners for a site opposite the Tower of London.

Before he became mayor, Ken was less than ecstatic about the design, describing it memorably as a "glass testicle". This was a rude version of the "glass bubble" epithet, coined as early computer images of the design hit the media. Yet this is not a crystal ball. Nor is it transparent, since, as is usually the case, you cannot see through windows or glazing from a distance. They do not "read" as see-through, but as dark panels rather like TV screens when switched off.

There are exceptions to this general rule. With mirror glass, you see a reflection. At night, if the space behind the glass is illuminated, you can see straight in - provided there are no curtains or blinds. During the day, glass is transparent if there is a lighter object behind it, for example net curtains. The glass is transparent, but you still cannot see the room. True transparency in buildings is most obvious in empty office buildings, so-called "see-through" buildings, where you can literally look right through them from a building opposite. (One further and sinister exception is the world of the peeping Tom.)

When architects use the word transparency, this often merely means "this building is glazed". Transparency has nothing to do with it. But what about transparency as metaphor? On the face of it, this is a more promising proposition. After all, in the case of the GLA, visitors will be able to see elected members "at work" in the assembly chamber. They will see them as they progress up a spiralling walkway to the top of the building, where there are splendid views of the City of London and Tower Bridge. It is the same principle that Lord Foster used in his conversion of the Reichstag, a much larger project but conceptually connected.

These spirals are architecturally spectacular, have proved a hit with the public in Berlin, and will doubtless do so on the banks of the Thames. But does the metaphor hold good? Doubtful. After all, if you want to see elected politicians at work, you can go to the House of Commons (Pugin and Barry's marvel of stone and timber), and sit in an entirely artificially lit chamber. Just how transparent does an all-glass City office building feel? Is it a welcoming symbol of an open society, or the latter-day equivalent of a fortress with better-dressed security?

There is, however, another group for whom transparency has much more reality. That is, the people who actually occupy buildings and look out of them, rather than the public who view from a distance. Lord Foster's real glass edifice in London is not the Greater London Authority, pointing due north and designed differently from front to back, but his "erotic gherkin" building for the insurance giant Swiss Re, now under construction in the heart of the City of London. This is a building which will bring comfort to the glass industry worldwide, promising to become an icon that will represent modernity in that most traditional of areas. (It is interesting to contrast the use of glass here with the Lloyds Building by Lord Rogers; there, you get few views out. The glazing is to let light in, rather like medieval cathedrals.) The "gherkin" represents a 21st-century response to a profoundly influential Berlin design, never built: Mies van der Rohe's Friedrichstrasse office scheme of 1921, itself a modernist version of the Versailles Palace or indeed Crystal Palace.

In the cases both of the Reichstag and the GLA building, the idea of transparency as metaphor is not sustainable. But this does not mean that the buildings are failures. On the contrary, they are both examples of highly sophisticated design, in which issues of energy efficiency, internal organisation and structural gymnastics play an important role. For London, the replacement for County Hall could not be more different. It will be surprising if the mayor and staff do not enjoy their new offices, and the building, along with a giant model of central London, look certain to become an attraction for Londoners and visitors alike.

However, as far as open government is concerned, it is not transparency in a visual sense that matters. It is scrutiny. Those select committees who go about their work in (generally) unglamorous rooms, sometime without any natural light at all, are the eyes and ears of democracy; those Hansard reporters, those BBC microphones, not gawping visitors, are our democratic safeguards. Being there, rather than looking in, is what matters. And, of course, being able to report freely what you experience.

Paul Finch is editorial director of the Architects' Journal

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