Elena Rocchi Maybe Yes. Maybe No.
As a child, I spent many of my summer afternoons in Tuscany, at my aunt’s home, observing the sunlight filtered through the wooden shutters. At a specific time, a thin beam of light would enter the room and envelop grains of dust spreading the light in every direction. Those moments triggered something, a kind of memory, the unconscious experiencing windows as connections. For a long time, I wondered who had invented those artifacts that filtered the outside, that looked down the street where I learned to ride a bicycle, that mediated the observed and separated me from it. In that room, I was happy because I could feel something Gaston Bachelard put into words: “When the refuge is safe enough, the tempest is good.” During my training as an architect, that understanding turned into a rational category that applies to the built environment: windows connect the reality of rooms to the ineffable of social life as they happen in the continuity of space as suspensions. There, we meet with the transcendent and observe the other side of the world’s surface. Before those summers, windows to me were objects I would open and close without realizing it. Since then, I cannot imagine the world without dramaturgy of my life.
windows
as they orchestrate the
They are, for me, the deepest and most mysterious architectural object invented by our natural need for connection — maybe yes, maybe not. Figure 1. Archivo Drexler, N 716.63, p 81, Interior perspective of living room, looking south. Pencil, wood veneer, cut-out color reproduction (Paul Klee, Bunte Mahlzeit 1928), and illustration board photographs. (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
1 COOPER, David, Heidegger on Nature, Environmental Values, Vol. 14, No. 3, Nature and Continental Philosophy (August 2005). ² This is one of three collages for the Resor House Mies van der Rohe produced in 1939. ³ Colomina, Beatriz, “Battle Lines: E 1027,” 1, The Architect: Reconstructing Her Practice, by Francesca Hughes MIT Press, (1998): p 6 ⁴ Cohen, Jean-Louis, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Taylor & Francis, 1996. p 93.
