The Urban Window Amherst MA
(978) 256-1808
Chelmsford, MA
(617) 561-4300
Boston, MA
The Urban Window
Source: residential architect Magazine
Publication date: January 1, 2007
By hansy better barraza
As architects and designers, we are constantly dealing with the relationship between inside and outside and the way in which this relationship affects inhabitants' perceptions of place. The outside is usually referred to as something that is “other,” exterior, or perhaps understood as the context. The modernist movement taught us that the relationship between inside and outside is to be seamless and intimately related.
For Le Corbusier, the horizontal window became the modernist paradigm. It was similar to the aspect ratio of the camera—the mechanized eye extending its view to the horizon. The window floated, removing itself from the specificity of a site, yet registering a universal horizon line and allowing for the outside to become part of each room. Le Corbusier believed in the sublime bucolic landscape—the building as an autonomous object divorced from its context, yet always reinscribing itself within a context.
For other canonical figures, such as Auguste Perret, the window took on a functional role as its dimensions and orientation were compared to that of a human figure. The vertical window was more in proportion with the human body; it dealt with the evolution of the body in the vertical stance. The window began to take on a literary figure; it was in dialogue with human growth.