Windows on the World
May 2024
by Matteo Pericoli
I still remember vividly the feeling of bewilderment I felt when, now 20 years ago, I stood in front of my window on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for what would be one of the last times in my life. I had lived in that apartment with my wife for seven years and the time had come to move out. With the boxes now packed, there suddenly stood before me another ‘thing’ that we were almost forgetting to take with us: the window of our bedroom / my studio and, glued to it, the view of a series of courtyards, roofs, chimneys, water towers and, in the background, the tip of Riverside Church that had kept me company for so long.
I thought of removing the window from the wall and taking both it and the view with us. No way. I checked carefully to see if a hypothetical transparent plastic coating could be peeled off the window, which might have miraculously retained the images of both the frame and the view. No way. I then tried to photograph the whole thing, but what I was looking for turned out to be much more elusive than I thought: in fact, the photos seemed to show either the frame or the cityscape beyond the window, not both. The problem could have been my camera, or my hand, or more simply my inexperience with photography.
So I decided to take a large roll of wrapping paper and hastily draw on it the window almost on a 1:1 scale. So it was that, to my enormous surprise, I noticed the large amount of detail that I had missed. “But how is this possible?” I asked myself, ”this is the Manhattan cityscape that I am more familiar with than any other. I’ve been sitting beside this window for seven years, turned to look out an inordinate number of hours, and only now do I notice all these details.” I then decided to explore further, using drawing, the strange interdependent relationship we have with this architectural object-non-object. Often it is a strong bond, almost affection, sometimes there is instead detachment or even annoyance.
I asked a multitude of people to show me their windows, to allow me to draw them, to describe them to me and tell me about the relationship they had with this hole in the wall. I realized that in order to fulfill the irresistible desire I had to tell the story of the city where I was living at the time, New York, I would have to observe it from the most intimate perspective of all: that of those who look at it (actively or passively) from their windows. I have been drawing windows ever since. I have designed hundreds of them. Windows that look out on cities, windows that look out on nature, on the sea, on meadows, on forests.
Windows that show us the present, that look out toward the past, into that very past which, with its concatenations, has brought us to that precise point in time and space. Although the drawings always show the same subject — the tangible (the frame) framing the intangible (the view) — my attention has gradually shifted from the outside to the inside, from what is seen to how and why we see.
Drawing after drawing, the glass has been gradually transforming into a mirror in which, with each glance, we end up seeing reflected ourselves and our thoughts, our desires, our hopes; the past mingling with the present. Of all the construction, constituent and compositional elements in architecture, the window is undoubtedly the one with the greatest narrative potential.
