Resembling modern, three-dimensional sculptures, jigsaw houses can range from interlocking meshed boxes to walls of glass that blur the line between interior and exterior.

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Most of the greatest glass boxes were designed by Mies, who realized the potential of suspending a "glass curtain" on a steel frame as early as 1928 with his Barcelona Pavilion: Since all the support needed was provided by the metal, the architect could use walls to sculpt space, as Mies did brilliantly with a delicate balance of transparent and reflective surfaces.

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More important in terms of actual building, the glass boxes were economical compared to Beaux Arts marble, a crucial consideration in the period of postwar inflation.

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Mies left us a series of 20th-century masterpieces, a revolution in the building art and a sea of imitators' glass boxes that remain conspicuously unloved.

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That shift is also much in evidence at the Seattle Public Library, a diamond-scaled stack of origami-folded glass boxes that opened to considerable acclaim almost a decade ago.

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Landis' original Valentine's Day gift now anchors a collection of more than 100 boxes, arranged by color in locked glass shelving in their bedroom.

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Buffeted by the building boom, the increasingly generic glass boxes-- the sort that dominate certain sweeps of Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan--came to seem ubiquitous, even inescapable, guaranteeing their place in history and serial rejection by factions all the way from the Supreme Soviet to the postmodernists.

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Standing silently but amiably to one side, he would unbolt the magic boxes, hold the ropes, demonstrate the emptiness of beakers and pots, confirm the thickness of a sheet of glass before a near-naked girl would climb into a magic box and pass straight through it!

ECONOMIST: Ali Bongo | The