Above: Photograph of Bill Price by Rocky Kneten. In preparation for a class exercise to design an arts center (student Jeanette Robards's model, above), Bill Price had his students explore the concept of opacity. Above: Price's experiments with concrete composed of glass and plastic could lead to buildings, perhaps entire cities, made of a material that transmits light. Steven Stankiewcz.

"I had a vision," Price says. Understated yet solid, like the materials around him, he is wearing blue jeans and a black jersey, his limp brown hair just a shade too long about his ears to be businesslike and too short to be bohemian. Price looks like a pop star attending his son's communion. "I was living in Rotterdam," he says, "in one of the illuminated towers on the Maas River near the Erasmus Bridge, standing on my balcony gazing out at the cityscape at night. Before me I saw an unskinned concrete building going up, with light sifting through all the perforations in the concrete. Suddenly I saw an inverse image, with the perforations solid and the concrete letting light enter the building. The vision spread quickly across the scene. All the buildings were built with a material that would transmit light. I asked myself if we could make a whole new city this way."

During the past four years the 35-year-old Price has had several of these powerful visions. They seize him in various locations--exiting the highway on his way from Charles de Gaulle airport, in Paris; in his Houston office; and at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Rem Koolhaas's firm in Rotterdam, where Price worked for four and a half years. The inspiration for these visions was a question Koolhaas uttered during a meeting about a concert hall the firm was designing in Porto, Portugal: "Could we make the concrete translucent?"

"Rem was very much into researching transparency," Price says, switching on the two slide projectors placed at opposite sides of his computer monitor to begin his presentation. "Transparency in building--but also in modeling. At one point in almost every OMA project the models were constructed to be transparent. It was like X-raying the program arrangement."

Price's presentation begins with a slide of Europe at night, taken by satellite. The sleeping continent spreads across the white office wall; constellations of light, concentrated in Paris, London, Lisbon, and Brussels, flicker their poignant, indecipherable messages out toward the distant sky. "When we were working on the Porto concert hall, I started thinking about how the complex might be seen from above. I saw it as a glowing ember in the landscape--a sort of lightbulb on the skin of the Earth. What kind of icon could this structure be for the people flying over it? Could it be a sign, representing the heart of European culture?"

Translucent concrete is more of an embryo than a grown child. The first samples were produced in September 1999. Early last year Price conducted compression and flexural strength tests on several small samples and produced a series of stress-and-strain diagrams for the material. Last September he began sending discreet inquiries to commercial manufacturers in hopes of expediting his research. Yet aside from those manufacturers, and a few trusted friends and associates, Price has not publicized or published his research. There has been no mention of "translucent concrete" in either the mainstream or trade press. Koolhaas may have been the first to utter the words, but there's no question that it's Price's baby. Only someone like Price, with an architect's broad vision and an artisan's narrow focus, could tinker with the composition of a new material while simultaneously exploring its applications in building and design.

Born in 1965 in Fort Knox, Kentucky, he grew up on a farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of five children, Price spent his childhood reading Thoreau and Emerson, tending cattle, and building elaborate, environmentally friendly tree forts with his twin brother, Robert. The family frequently worked together restoring their nineteenth-century rural home. "I grew up in an environment where you could make freely," Price recalls, switching to a slide of a silicate-fabric chimney fastened with Velcro that he designed for OMA's award-winning Villa Floirac, in Bordeaux, France.

In fall 1984 Price enrolled in the architecture program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), in Blacksburg, taking a bachelor's degree in 1991 and a master's of architecture in 1994. Descended thematically from the Bauhaus, with strong ties to Switzerland, Virginia Tech has a teaching tradition of making and materials. "The first time I saw Bill's work was at the villa of one of the Virginia Tech faculty in Blacksburg," says Gary Bates, an American-born architect with Space Group in Oslo, Norway, and a former classmate. Bates also worked at OMA (1992­98), and was responsible for bringing Price there. "Out back, in a garden, there were twenty 24 x 36 constructions. They were most like collages, composites made using textiles, clothing, painting on canvas, plasters, cement. They weren't models as such, but investigations into space, into the construction process. Interesting, and beautiful. I knew, even from these, that Bill was an amazingly physical guy, and not just a paper architect."

Upon finishing his master's, Price took a job with Rudy Hunziker in Tesserete, Switzerland, near Lugano. On Bates's suggestion, he was hired by Koolhaas in 1996 to establish a research-and-development office. Price's work at OMA centered on the creation of a corporate memory. With the Rotterdam firm's high turnover rate--the average length of stay for an associate there varies from three months to two years--there was little cross-referencing from one project or solution to the next. Much of the studio's experience and knowledge was lost or poorly placed. Price recalls that in his first year at OMA almost half the research requests he received were redundant. With the help of three software engineers he enlisted from the United States, Price developed an intraoffice Web site with databases in materials and specifications, drawings, and images. Designers could search under "glass" or "transparency" or "houses," and access all of the studio's work in those categories.

During his four years at OMA, along with his design responsibilities and duties as director of R&D, Price continued to ruminate on Koolhaas's idea of translucent concrete. It wasn't an obsession--Price is not the type of man who has obsessions. But it was an original, practical, and just trendy enough idea to animate a good deal of his thinking. Price's notebooks from those years are filled with sketches, diagrams, random notes, and philosophical reflections inspired by his not yet defined material: drawings of trees near Charles de Gaulle Airport sleeved in plastic insect mesh (the notes below one sketch read "157 kilometers per hour" with the exact time listed at "1:13--made translucent, almost weightless, levitating in the midday sun"); diagrams of the various components and magical proportions that might yield this elusive mixture; notes that Angelica from Rugrats uses a makeup that is activated and deactivated by the temperature of the water with which she washes her face; and syllogisms that differentiate between the desire that drives the quality and nature of a thing, and the need that dictates that thing's physical properties.

"It's something my father taught me," Price says, switching to another slide of the OMA Villa Floirac, "to find solutions quickly, with the materials available to you. At the Bordeaux house, one of the sliding glass windows kept sticking. The concrete mass above it kept expanding during the heat of day. People involved in the construction said we should change the motor or redesign the track. But it was a matter of sanding down the area where it was pinching."

For translucent concrete, the desire was to transform the traditionally opaque elements of a building--foundation, walls, roof, supporting column--into components that could transmit light. Light travels through it in different quantities and intensities, depending on its composition. Most of Price's samples and renderings emit a glow, like a soft-light bulb, or Greek marbles shedding hours of absorbed daylight as the sun sinks into the sea.

The need (those physical questions Price is so good at answering) was that the translucent material be pourable--and that once solidified it support weight, absorb shock, insulate, and endure as well as or better than traditional concrete. Price chose to concentrate on the material itself and launched a systematic analysis of concrete to find which of its four traditional components--or which combination of aggregate, binder, reinforcement, and form--was best suited as a carrier of light. He wondered whether the aggregate, which is usually made of crushed gravel, might permit some light to travel through its mass if he varied the density. He looked to replace cement--the customary binder in concrete--with translucent materials like plastic. For reinforcement, normally effected with opaque steel rods, Price thought of ferrying light through the cement mass by using translucent reinforcement such as plastic. He even experimented with manipulating the surface of the concrete to create points for light transmission.

"My ultimate goal was to create a material to change concrete--but still keep the construction technique intact," Price says, switching to a slide of a poured block of translucent concrete made from a crushed-glass aggregate and a plastic binder. Lit from underneath, it seems to breathe light like the sun breaking through winter ice. He reaches behind him onto the bookshelf, takes a small cylinder made from the same material, and places it and two other samples onto his desk. They look like high-design paperweights: crushed glass, plastic tubes, and crushed opaque gravel frozen in translucent plastic. It's easy to imagine a tabletop made of this material--or an entire wall of a house, theater, or museum.

"This could be made into blocks or bricks," Price observes, switching to a slide of yet another OMA project, a series of weight-bearing translucent columns he helped design for a social-services center commissioned by Samsung in Korea. Here too, the solution is ingenious and simple: a glass cylinder within another glass cylinder, with a film between them that transforms into foam to create a fire barrier. "But ultimately, I'd love a material that you can just pour into a form. It would restructure the whole scene. What a great thing for architecture--to have this new element given to it. I'm working with an architect's fever. I'm not trying to solve a specific structural problem. I'm trying to develop this new material, then see what we can do with it."

Price may claim to have ignored--or at least shelved--considerations of how his new composite might transform his profession. But he has expanded his research into usability patents and potential industry partners. "The university development timeline is notoriously slow," he explains. When forced to speculate, Price believes his material could be used in construction as well as for design objects: bathtubs, toilets, tables, even lamps and lampshades.

Translucent concrete will need to be further researched, perfected, and tested before widespread applications are possible. The analyses conducted thus far--tests done in the laboratory at Virginia Tech on small columns and cylindrical sections of translucent concrete with the crushed-glass aggregate and plastic binder--have shown the new material to be superior to traditional concrete in compression and flexure. But large-scale applications of his new material are still months--if not years--away. Neither Price nor anyone else can respond to questions about thermal dynamics, heat transfer, seismic stability, or a host of other construction parameters. The material is currently being considered for two small case-study houses, and for a construction experiment in Europe.

Economics is also a factor. The costs of the components in the most successful mix make translucent concrete about five times more costly than traditional concrete, and would limit at least first-generation applications to large-budget projects. Price argues that this too is relative, because builders would need less of it to obtain the same performance they would get if they used ordinary concrete.

Several of Price's colleagues and mentors exude boundless enthusiasm over the potential applications of Price's research. "Architecture is still kind of medieval in its nature," says Frank Weiner, head of the Department of Architecture at Virginia Tech. Weiner knew Price when he was a student, and likes to point out that a wooden speaker's podium Price designed as an undergraduate remains in use. "We're still building buildings from the ground up. It's exciting for someone to challenge some of the fundamental facts of architecture. But what's important about this is that finally we can say we may be on the threshold of being able to build the first modern buildings."

Robert Dunay, associate dean of the Virginia Tech architecture department and director of industrial design, believes translucent concrete might solve one of architecture's oldest dichotomies. "Historically, solidity and lightness have always been at odds," says Dunay, whose industrial-design students helped Price develop and test his samples during Price's tenure as an adjunct professor of architecture in the 1999­2000 academic year. "Translucent concrete might give us the ability to deal with some of the attributes of concrete--strength, stability, and molding--but also give the qualities people normally associate with glass. This would have both large- and small-scale applications."

Wim Eckert, a Zurich-based architect who worked with Price at OMA, believes translucent concrete could solve a problem with a house he and his associates are designing for an information-technology magnate. The house fronts a lovely view on the Zurichsee, the freshwater lake bordering Zurich. But the remainder of the environment is insipidly residential. "It could be really interesting to incorporate natural lighting conditions into a totally opaque facade with this material," Eckert says, "so that the structure becomes a kind of skin for light. You could have the ghost of mediocrity--the natural light of the surroundings--without being confronted with the physical presence."

Even more than the specific project, Eckert is excited by the structural possibilities translucent concrete might provide. "If we work with transparency, it usually needs to be held," he says. "This means you constantly add joints to the building. If we could reduce this into one material, which could have a structural cohesion with concrete, you lose a joint. It would be really interesting to have a jointless building, because joints are always a technical problem. If we could use this material to eliminate the weak points in a building, that would be a groundbreaking architectural concept."