The eye of a building

Friday Fragment #8

‘For me a window is the eye of the building, and the door is the mouth.’¹ Those are the words of the Finnish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa. If in architecture, the window is indeed essential to the physiognomy of a building – in the same way that the eye is to the body – for the photographer, one could possibly claim the window as the lungs. As a novice photographer, the window was the single constant in my work: the light-giving place to which I took each subject I wished to photograph. Early on, I didn’t understand what influenced the different qualities of light I would find at each window. The front of the office building I worked in for many years faced west, receiving a harsh lick of naked light in the late afternoon of a clear summer’s day. Earlier that morning, the terrace at the back of the office would have its Bath-stone wall picked out in bright buttery yellow. Today, on arriving at any new space where I photograph, the window is the first element of the room that I give my attention to. It functions as the light source for my photography, the lungs of my work. (Indeed, a spare lung often travels with me these days and can be set up and plugged into the dimmest of corners to illuminate the darkest of rooms.) The window is much more than just the source of photography’s essential medium, light (the etymology of the word photography is ‘drawing with light’). The window is also that place that separates interior from exterior and that which is enclosed from that which is open. The writer will take this further, demarcating an easily understood and metaphorically rich threshold – the confined world that exists inside a space, contrasted with the escapism and freedom that lies outside, beyond the glass. In the wider arts, it’s both a distancing and voyeuristic device that conjures dreams, can create mystery and suspense, and which signifies fear and potential tragedy. Consider the different dramatic curiosities played out through the windows of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and Night Windows; or the sinister aperture capitalised on in Hitchcock’s most suspenseful masterpiece, Rear Window. For artists – indeed, for anyone with imagination and curiosity – the window is loaded with potential, rich with meaning. On arrival last week at a new restaurant, where the centre window looked out across the Solent, from island to the mainland, and where the blue-brown waters lapped up against the wall of the garden outside, I was happy with both the eye of my building and with this lung for my practice, and the potential for drawing with light once more.

‘Friday Fragment’ is an additional weekly instalment to my A Thousand Fragments monthly newsletter.

1. Eduardo Souto de Moura & Juhani Pallasmaa in conversation. Read full article here.