For the last 300 years, windows have reflected the ever-changing appearance and aspirations of the American home.
The so-called “eyes” of a structure, windows have evolved from the small lead glass casements of Puritan homes to the iconic walls of glass of the 1950s to a futuristic model equipped with a computer, video or television screen.
The National Building Museum has mounted a major exhibition on the crucial role that windows have played in shaping U.S. architecture and domestic lifestyles. It opened in late March and will continue through Aug. 11.
“We’re hoping the exhibition will show the kind of power the window has as a carrier of meaning, a definer of form and style,” observed Howard Decker, the museum’s chief curator since October 2000 and a founder of Chicago’s DLK Architecture Inc.
Celebrating the nation’s buildings since 1985, the museum occupies the landmark Pension Building, renowned for its football field-size Great Hall that has hosted presidential inaugural balls from Grover Cleveland to George W. Bush.
Under the direction of Donald Albrecht, exhibitions curator at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, “Picture This: Windows on the American Home” offers a spare but entertaining look at the history of this perennial domestic fixture.
Too often, windows have been overlooked. “Windows in a building are the most interesting thing in America,” Gertrude Stein wrote in 1937. “It is hard to remember them because they are so interesting.”
Among the other quotes that appear on the walls of the exhibition: “The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for the window,” from architect Le Corbusier in 1927.
The multimedia event uses old movie clips starring brief window encounters by the likes of Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Loretta Young and Cary Grant. Also featured are television excerpts, large-scale drawings of significant buildings such as Chicago’s Glessner House on Prairie Avenue and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s twin apartment towers or “glass houses” at 860-880 N. Lake Shore Drive.
Samples of glass, advertisements and actual windows from different periods are included too.
More Top Picks Best Pegboards For Garages
For pharaohs only
Sandy Isenstadt, assistant professor of architecture at Yale University, noted that glass initially was a scarce and treasured item, and in ancient times, only the pharaohs of Egypt could afford the luxury of windows.
“The Pilgrims brought windows on the Mayflower when they came to Massachusetts in 1620,” said Isenstadt, the exhibition’s historian. “Windows often belonged to the renters of a house who would remove them when they moved. Early records show that windows were also prized wedding presents.”
The exhibition chronicles the technological advances of windows from simple devices for controlling light and air to complex systems for eliminating unwanted dust, sound and harmful ultraviolet and infrared rays.
In the 18th Century, the double-hung window and movable sash were introduced and would eventually become standard for American homes. Similarly, by the mid-19th Century, flat, clear glass could be mass-produced — a revolutionary development from the small leaded glass window with bull’s-eye panes of the 1690s.
Until the 20th Century, carpenters fashioned windows by hand at construction sites or local millwork shops. Gradually, Isenstadt said, companies began to manufacture the various window components and eventually the entire window.
In 1932, the Andersen Corp. of Bayport, Minn., which is sponsoring the show as part of its 100th anniversary, introduced the first completely assembled window with sash, frame and hardware.
Other innovations followed, including windows that were more resistant to wind, rain and dirt, easier to clean and equipped with vinyl-clad wooden parts that did not need to be painted.
Among the exhibit’s highlights is a timeline of illustrations that demonstrates how windows define a house’s architectural style and sometimes reveal the character of the occupants.
For example, in Chicago’s Glessner House, Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson subordinated the windows to the massive walls in creating his Romanesque style masterpiece. The windows, accordingly, look “sober, shadowed and set deep into the wall.”
Changing one’s outlook
The exhibition also examines windows as tools for taming and framing the outdoors — in effect, domesticating the best exterior vistas for the home’s interior. When more desirable or ideal views were not available, especially in urbanized settings, prosperous homeowners sometimes relied on multiglass windows or hand-painted shades.
One alternative was a window depicting a shimmering landscape of stream, waterfall and mountains crafted from pieces of opalescent glass in the New York studio of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). For the show, the museum has borrowed a Tiffany window from the Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows at Chicago’s Navy Pier, which came from the city’s Pullman neighborhood.
With the introduction of television in the 1940s, the exhibition points out, the American home acquired what was described as a “new window to the world.” In a 1947 brochure, Du Mont Laboratories proclaimed: “Television is a bright window overlooking the world parade — a parade that transforms your favorite easy chair into a choice box at top-flight entertainment everywhere; that makes you an honored guest at exclusive functions . . . that slips you unseen through police lines wherever news is in the making.”
In the 1950s, cars and houses — at the time the major markets for flat glass — were hailed in advertisements for their ability to capture spectacular views of the landscape. The luxurious Lincoln, for example, offered “an amazing view” with its “3,721 square inches of glass,” comparable to the scenery from an oversize window in a well-appointed dining room.
Swimming into view
The exhibition also examines, in a section labeled “I Spy,” the window’s potential for unwanted exposure to outsiders. The demand for wall-size windows inevitably raised potential conflicts with contemporary notions of privacy.
Houses with many windows suffer from the “fishbowl effect,” the exhibition noted, and enable neighbors to observe a family’s decorations and possessions.
Technology, however, again may come to the rescue.
In the Access House project, a beach house proposed for St. Simon’s Island, Ga., with floor-to-ceiling windows, an architectural team in New York has installed electronic monitors in the center walls with TV, video and Internet capability. The so-called E-core “windows” not only complement the ocean views but also safeguard the house and its occupants.
The exhibition also provides another look at the future of the home and its windows. In the Andersen Corp.’s Project Odyssey, the window has been equipped to function also as a computer screen or television, enabling homeowners to find recipes or check a child’s activities elsewhere in the house.
Andersen spokesman Cameron Snyder said such an innovation, unveiled at the recent International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas, is almost certain “to make the home of the future look more like the home of the past.”
The Odyssey Project would force homeowners, he predicted, to rediscover the importance of windows rather than arranging their furniture and domestic lives around the television and computer.
———-
`Picture This: Windows on the American Home’
What: An exhibition on the role windows have played in shaping U.S. architecture and domestic lifestyles.
Where: National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW, Washington, D.C.
More Top Picks Best Nintendo Switch Consoles
When: Daily through Aug. 11
Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays
Cost: free; $5 donation suggested
Call: 202-272-2448
Online: www.nbm.org