Glasshouse is produced entirely in Murano glass by Berengo Studio in Venice. Standing approximately two metres high, the work recreates a children's playhouse. Yet the extreme fragility of the glass contradicts this familiar image: what appears to invite interaction proves untouchable, establishing a paradox between familiarity and inaccessibility.

The use of glass as a structural material evokes the architectural utopias of modernism, particularly the visions of architects such as Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, for whom transparency symbolised a new social order founded on rationality, openness and progress. In Glasshouse, this modernist ideal is both invoked and challenged, revealing the ambivalence of transparency as both a promise of freedom and an instrument of exposure.

The work also engages with The Glass House (1926–1930), Sergei Eisenstein's unrealised film project. Set within a completely transparent skyscraper, the film imagined a society in which everyone lives under the constant gaze of others, transforming transparency into a metaphor for surveillance, control and the erosion of privacy.

In Glasshouse, Joana Vasconcelos relocates these ideas to the domestic and emotional sphere. The house, traditionally understood as a place of shelter and refuge, becomes entirely transparent, eliminating any possibility of privacy. The modernist utopia thus re-emerges in a setting that is at once familiar and unsettling, where transparency no longer signifies emancipation but instead reveals the inherent vulnerability of the human condition.