Treacherous Transparencies analyzes transparency as expressed in architecture and art in an attempt to understand the intentions and objectives that underlie its use by pertinent architects and artists. This book looks at a few important works by selected artists and architects for whom transparency is an artistic strategy, which they implement primarily with glass and mirrors but with other media as well. The architects and artists brought together in this context form an unlikely alliance: Bruno Taut, Ivan Leonidov, Marcel Duchamp, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Dan Graham, and Gerhard Richter. But they do have something in common: their work marks salient way stations in the development of modernism up to the present day.