The dematerialization of Saint-Denis into a diaphanous volume of light is indebted to the interpretations of Erwin Panofsky. In Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, he argues for an interpretation of medieval architecture as responding to a desire for rationality and clarity. Modern architecture, in its own obsession with transparency, inherited the demystified body of Christ and the resultant dematerialization of the building craft. Gothic architecture is often claimed as a precursor to the modern. This attitude is implicit in structural interpretations of medieval building form and explicit in descriptions of Cistercian churches as simple, minimalist, and even puritanical.

Projecting backward from Thomas Aquinas, Panofksy reads a “principle of transparency” guiding Suger's conceptualization of the enlargement of the abbey church. He proposes the emerging organizational strategies for assembling books as a clear expression of structure equivalent to the experience of light within the cathedral. Within Panofsky's interpretation, Saint-Denis is an “orgy of Neoplatonic light metaphysics.” Suger's work, in this interpretation, is filled with light out of a desire for metaphysical “clarity.” Unfortunately, Panofksy hews too close to the writing of Pseudo-Dionysius to interpret Suger's desire for regulation and order. While Neoplatonic metaphysics might have dismissed matter as “sheer” without the guidance of form, Suger did not. Panofsky presents the Gothic as the “final solution”—a “clarification for clarification's sake… of functional contexts in architecture”—to the problems of medieval architecture. His rationalization removes the crucial cosmological significance of its matter to read it as a precedent for modern architecture.

There is a direct path from Panofsky's “final solution” for medieval architecture to the contemporary architect's drawing with light on a screen. Inside the cathode ray tube, a gun shoots beams of light that merge into the general glow, exposing timeless buildings. The truth of these computational architectures is founded on the belief that reductive abstraction—in the form of a dematerialized and clear image—is equivalent to reality. No distinction exists in the rationalization of contemporary architectural images when what is assumed to be absolutely dematerialized is also absolutely true. However, the matter has not disappeared. The architectural representation results from the collision of embodied subatomic particles with a glass wall, whether that wall is a screen or medieval stone. In these cases, the architectural image is an effect of a material condition.