Wind Eye: The Domestic Anatomy of Windows

Look at your house, or apartment, and picture it as a body.  What’s the face, the mouth, the skin?

In any residence, the eyes are the windows.

Domestic anatomy: we are bodies, and we experience our surroundings in body language and image.   

(I might write more sometime about domestic anatomy; the mouth of the house/body would be the front door, or the kitchen.  The back door and the garbage cans, the bathroom – that’s the house’s bladder and intestines.  The bones – that would be the house’s foundation and beams.  Our domestic skin – the roof and walls.  That’s actually a building term, the skin of a building.)

But for today, windows and eyes.  Without our body’s windows, the eyes, we are blind.  Without our house’s eyes, the windows, we’re in the dark and separated from the outside world.

Our English word “window” comes from the Old Norse word  “vindauga,” which means “wind eye.”  

Those old Norse, so many great words.  What they called “windows” were burlap or wood shutters over a hole in the wall, as Asians had oiled paper windows, and Romans translucent marble.   Glass windows weren’t invented until the 14^th century, and only became common in middle class homes in the 17^th century.

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The “wind eye”: the eye of the house that lets in the wind, or sees the wind, or wonders what the wind is doing out there.  Beauty is in the eye of the wind. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________

Two interesting times and places in the history of windows: 17^th century Holland and 1901 New York City.

The 17^th century Dutch were good at a lot of things: shipbuilding, international finance, universities, religious tolerance, tulips, Rembrandt and Vermeer.  Being a rising world power led to a vibrant bourgeoisie who virtually created domestic architecture, simple, warm homes filled with light.

My favorite writer on architecture, Witold Rybczynski tells this story in his great book, Home: a Short History of an Idea.  Up until then houses were bigger, with extended families and tenants all living together, and darker, with wooden shutters and smoky rooms.  But these newly bourgeois folks had the money and desire to build homes just for their families, no need for tenants.  So they built smaller and more simple houses.  They wanted the walls to be light in weight, since they were built on pilings on reclaimed land.  And they wanted them to have light, not those gloomy medieval house.  So they used a lot of these new fangled things called windows (or whatever the Dutch word is) because glass windows did both – they were light, lighter than wooden or stucco walls.  And they brought light far into these narrow interiors. 

At first their windows were like their doors – Dutch!  Divided horizontally, there was glass only at the top, with wood on the bottom.  As glass improved, they made the windows bigger, but it became awkward to open such large windows.  So they invented a new type of window, the sash, or double hung window, split in half vertically, opening in or out.  Soon these were copied in England and France.

Look at this Vermeer, like most of his paintings, a domestic scene.  The bright, sunlight rooms were cheerful, in contrast to the dark interiors that were typical in paintings from other countries.  Vermeer’s famous light symbolizes all that is new in Holland, and the wall map of the New World underlines this point; light symbolizes the new and wakes us up to the new. The Enlightenment and the invention of windows happened about the same time.  It’s harder to stay insular and traditional, when the “wind’s eye” is beckoning you outside.

Two centuries later waves of immigrants flooded to New York’s Lower East Side.   Slumlords built block after block of tenement buildings with long narrow multi-family apartments, called railroad flats because they were like a line of train cars.  These rooms had no exterior windows.  Overcrowding and lack of air and light led to disease and despair. 

Of the many reformation efforts to humanize these slums, a landmark law passed in 1901 required that every room in an apartment have an outward facing window and that buildings have inner shafts for air and light. This law revolutionized building design, with more corners to create space for windows, and interior light wells that brought much needed air to stagnant rooms. 

Without windows we can’t see and without windows we can breath. 

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One more thought about windows and eyes.  They are something of a paradox, because they are at the same time a source of great power, and they are inherently fragile.  A window opens up a room, a vista, as eyes open up our lives, creating possibility.  But both are also so vulnerable; a nick on the cornea, a crack in the glass, a shattered pane, a punctured eye ball – devastating. Poke my cheek – annoying.  Poke my eye – could be life changing.

That’s why we frame and protect them both.  Windows we protect with wood or steel frames.  Now there is shatterproof glass and even new kinds of plastic and glass that can even be a weight bearing part of the wall. 

And our bodies have evolved with greater eye protection - a complex orbital cavity in our skulls, 7 interconnected bones frame and shelter our tender eyeballs.  Plus eye lids – how often we close them in the face of a threat.  And safety glasses.  Our bodies know these little jellied balls need protection.

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It’s an old saying: our eyes are the windows of our soul.  If you can read this, thank your eyeballs.  And then go over to the window and look out.

Copyright © 2015 Deborah Streeter