Windows Overlooking Life and Death

"Rooms without a view are prisons for the people who have to stay in them."

When I walk down Forest Avenue in Oak Park--a veritable gallery of early Frank Lloyd Wright homes built in the first decade of the 20th century, I now think "I'd love to shelter-in-place in those places!". Many parts of the houses are designed as nooks or alcoves (and in some ways the entire house is a cluster of mini shelters), each designed for a specific activity, like reading--each with a "porthole" of some kind to views in the landscape--a tree with a treehouse, a river view, a view tilted to a specific angle of the sun. Simply looking at how the windows (sometimes referred to as "knockouts") are placed on the exterior gives hints to its programming. A dreamer himself, Wright realized that creativity can be enhanced by looking out a window. The Glass Houses of Mies and Philip Johnson were architectural metonyms: being in the house meant always being by the window (or a fireplace). The house is a window. The hearth (heart) in Johnson's Glass House is an indoor campfire viewed through a window.

In Wright's commercial buildings, windows usually concealed distracting views: If the view was unsightly (like the smokestacks around the Johnson Wax campus in Racine), he masked them (in this case) with a mesh of Pyrex tubes [again, a subtle self-reference (metonym) to the activity taking place within the building: chemistry].

All this is in stark contrast to E.M. Forster's dystopian short story The Machine Stops (1909) taking place in a suffocating dark underworld where humanity relies on a giant machine to provide its needs--a prediction of the internet and social media, and the use of respirators.

"At this - but it was too late - I took alarm. I determined to put on my respirator and to walk right out of the dell. But my respirator had gone...I realized that something evil was at work, and I had better escape to the other air, and, if I must die, die running towards the cloud....I never started. Out of the shaft - it is too horrible. A worm, a  long white worm, had crawled out of the shaft and gliding over the moonlit grass."

I would assume this story was read in a reading nook circa 1910 by a sunny window overlooking a garden.

"But humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine."

What are people now reading in Wright's nooks with ports to idyllic views?: The anomie of social media feeds about the impending apocalypse. Owners of Wright homes are so lucky to be swaddled in Wright's ideas of shelter, looking out a little window at the approaching storm, hoping it will not harm them.

One of my favorite books about place and space is Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. I can't recommend a book more highly. This is a book one would read in a Wright-designed reading nook with a window. It has a calming effect because it is so hopeful.

A list of terms from the book to provoke a feeling of a calm sense of space:

• Built-in seats
• Deep Reveals
• Structure Follows Social Spaces
• Secret Place: "Where can the need for concealment be expressed;  the need to hide; the need for something precious to be lost, and then revealed?" (930)
• Child Cave
• Sunny Counter
• Windows Overlooking Life: "Rooms without a view are prisons for the people who have to stay in them." (890)
• Alcoves
• Greenhouse
• Gallery Surround: "If people cannot walk out from the building onto balconies and terraces which look toward the outdoor space around the building, then neither they themselves nor the people outside have any medium which helps them feel that the building and the larger public world are intertwined." (778)
• Sitting Circle
• The Fire (Ironic for Wright!): "Television often gives a focus to a room, but it is nothing but a feeble substitute for something which is actually alive and flickering within the room. The need for fire is almost as fundamental as the need for water. Fire is an emotional touchstone, comparable to trees, other people, a house, the sky." (839)
• Window Place: "Everybody loves window seats, bay windows, and big windows with low sills and comfortable chairs drawn up to them." (834)
• Street Windows: "A street without windows is blind and frightening. And it's equally uncomfortable to be in a house which bounds a public street with no window at all on the street. (770)
• Sunny Place
• A Room of One's Own: "No one can be close to others, without also having frequent opportunities to be alone." (669)
• Zen View: "If there is a beautiful view, don't spoil it by building huge windows that gape incessantly at it. Instead, with the windows which look onto the view at places of transition-- along paths, in hallways, in entryways, on stairs, between rooms. If the view window is correctly placed, evil will see a glimpse of the distant view as they come up to the window or pass it:  but the view is never visible from the places where people stay." (643)
• Wings of Light: "Modern buildings are often shaped with no concern for natural light-- they depend almost entirely on artificial life. But buildings which displace natural light as the major source of elimination are not fit places to spend the day. Caption to photo of a glass office tower:  A monster (sic) building-- no concern for daylight inside." (525)

Universals:

• classification of inner states
• classification of space
• clusters
• containers
• culture/nature distinction
• daydreaming
• environment, adjustments to
• fire
• future, attempts to predict ("The Machine Stops")
• interest in bioforms (living things or things that resemble them)
• metonym
• private inner life
• sense of proportion