Maybe Yes. Maybe No. Elena Rocchi

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 windows as they orchestrate the dramaturgy of my life.

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.

I like to imagine them arriving on the facades chasing doors, bringing a breath of air into the homes of the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations at a time when hygiene was an urgency; I see them during their first encounter with Roman architecture, with the glass and this materiality we know as transparency turning them from being practical objects into categories related to virtual perception; and I often read about the day they were born again as metaphors for paintings — Alberti’s windows open onto the world. To me, from painting to Microsoft, all windows have one thing in common: they are places of multidimensional contact of the “quantifiable” of measures and materials with the “non-quantifiable” of sensations and imagination. ¹

One of my favorite window was never built, only represented by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as the collage No 716.63 he made in 1939 for the Resor House. ² This window is just a collage with a masterful poetic structure — a cosmogony of three physical-chromatic elements placed in the foreground, middle, and background that captures viewers inside. A brown settle, an enlarged color image of Klee’s Gay Repast (1928), and a photograph of a landscape in black and white are framed by an almost invisible pencil line as the large window’s fixtures and one pillar | | . What I love of this represented window is a fact: when I look at it, I never perceive that light pencil that organizes the three elements in the vertical plane of vision and regenerates them as an internal horizon, as “a boundary, an enclosure, an architecture.” That light pencil is precisely invisible as windows, as ‘the essential is often invisible to the eye.”

Have you ever wondered who invented windows? Maybe no one, as it is still unclear.

I keep looking at the dust in the light filtered by the shutters. In those moments of twilight, I halfclose my eyes to adjust their frame’s size. And I speculate that, in using their eyes like windows, first humans trained a capacity for abstracting reality using some skeleton structures Rudolph Arnheim called ‘representative concepts.’ I speculate that at one point, those humans that dwelt in caves kept coming together, built walls, and felt the necessity to open windows, following that same internal motion of those who made the rock paintings of Chauvet 30,000 years ago.

And I speculate that they probably did it together, pushing a little deeper that scratch they initially made in search of a clearer area on which to engrave a three-dimensional quality of life as images.

I like to think that no one but together we invented windows to connect nature, houses, and ourselves “into a higher unity,” precisely as Mies did in the collage No 716.63.

I might be wrong. Maybe Yes. Maybe No.

connections