117Nor is this reference to a glass house an isolated one. The motif recurs in his
essay on Karl Kraus, as it does in “Erfahrung und Armut.” There he talks of the ex-
ample of the “adjustable flexible glass houses that Loos and Le Corbusier have in the
meantime realized. It is not a coincidence that glass is so hard and smooth a mater-
ial to which nothing can be fastened. It is also cold and sober. Things that are made
of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is the enemy par excellence of secrecy. It is also the
enemy of property.”^102 Benjamin is implying here that, because it is inimical to se-
crecy and property, glass should be regarded as a material that literally expresses the
transparency of the new society that would be founded on revolutionary lines. A so-
ciety of this sort would have the political “radioscopy” of sexuality and the family, as
well as of the economic and physical conditions of existence, as part of its program
and therefore would be completely uninterested in protecting privacy in the home.^103116
63Le Corbusier, project for a villa
in Carthage, 1928, drawing of
the interior.
“Corbusier turned the abiding
places of man into a transit area
for every conceivable kind of
energy and for waves of light
and air.”