“What light through yonder window breaks?
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Windows shape what we see. They are lenses through which we peer at and understand the world. In an age where we spend increasingly more time indoors, we rely on windows to bring the outdoors inside.
Perhaps nothing improves a view like good windows. They are frames surrounding ever changing paintings. If we pay attention, the scenes we see from the windows in our homes, factories, offices, and shops become akin to works hung in galleries and museums.
A window, according to Webster, is “an opening in a wall of a building . . . to admit light . . . permit vision . . . and often to admit air.” Glass was a rare luxury until the 1600s, and according to some sources the word “window” derives from “wind-hole,” a ventilation opening in a building that might be covered with fabric or shutters when not in use. Despite such a simple definition and the ubiquity of windows in daily life, they come in mind-bending endless variations and configurations bounded only by human imagination and engineering feasibility.
Windows may be flat, rounded or pointed on top. They can be single, double or grouped. There are bay windows that project from the side of a building. Windows can be square, rectangular, or circular. Some circular ones have radiating mullions like the spokes of a wheel. There are crescent, eyebrow, triangular, and fan shapes. A window may be fixed in place, double hung, casement, louvered, sliding, pivoted, or swing open from the bottom or the top. It may be plain or highly ornamented.
Window glazing also comes in endless varieties. Glass may be clear or tinted in an array of shades. I delight in the character of old glass with its haphazard imperfections of bubbles and waves that often play with sunlight in prismatic sparkles. Some artisanal forms are in the style of antique bull’s eye and other old fashioned designs of varying opacities. Some glass is designed to admit light but not allow a view. Frosted glass comes in a range of styles principally to ensure privacy, stained glass is loved for its striking beauty, and glass blocks have both structural and artistic qualities. Even dirt, frost, rain, or cracked or broken glass affects our perception of what is beyond.
When we step into unfamiliar buildings or those we don’t regularly visit the tendency is to focus on the environment inside. It’s a way of understanding how others live and work, their habitat. But given how much time most people spend indoors, I also want to know something of how they view the outside world from within. Windows offer perspectives unique to their location, style, and placement. You understand a person more fully when you experience how they gaze out from their usual interior haunts.
How we perceive the world depends to a large degree on how we see it. We spend a good deal of time looking out windows. For hours on most days they are our portals to something beyond. We watch the weather, people passing by, vehicles, trees and other natural phenomena. We like a lots of natural light in our homes, and we crave workspaces from which we can see outside. Window seats are coveted in airplanes. A table by the window is often the hot spot in a restaurant.
At their best, windows beckon us to go outdoors. They are a tease, a sampling of larger possibilities. The contrast between the narrow focus of a window and the broad expanse of tangible reality beyond serves to amplify both. There are few pleasures greater than the comfort of a chair by the window and then stepping outside into an explosion of space and light. “To a clear eye,” wrote English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, “the smallest fact is a window through which the Infinite may be seen.” What you see (out the window) is not always the only thing you get.
