Introduction: Mobility, Concealment, Transparency

Abstract

Opening from an explication of the term ‘invisible architecture’, a concept which rethinks the relationship between mobility, concealment and transparency as elements of urban space, this Introduction analyses the Crystal Palace in George Gissing’s The Nether World (1889) as an example of the approach to be taken throughout the book. Through discussions of existing criticism, and of Chernychevsky and Dostoevsky’s appropriations of the Crystal Palace, the chapter positions the book within a tradition of undoing oppositions between the hidden and concealed, while also arguing for an approach that reads literature and architecture as mutually constitutive. It also introduces the idea of an interpenetration of visible and invisible via Sigfried Giedion, Jacques Rancière and Walter Benjamin, which will be taken up in later chapters.