3 Whatever. We can still be interested in symbols. What Actor Network Theory would like to impress upon us though, is that we cannot assume their meaning to be stable. There is always a symbolic dimension to how we interact with things, and windows are no exception. They are important domestic thresholds, and because of this are frequently used in art to indicate relationships between the individual and other domains. In Caspar David Friedrich’s Woman at the Window , the window represents an alternative possibility, something distant but somehow not that far away; a transgressable threshold, but a threshold the rupture of which would be of great consequence. In Seamus Heaney’s Digging , the window is used as the untransgressable barrier between the present and the past: we can look and we can ponder, but we cannot alter the events on the other side of the pane. On the other hand, in M E Csamer’s memorable This Motherless Child , the window represents the thin boundary between life and the beyond. The poet sits by the window, which turns from blue to gold while her mother quietly passes from her. Because windows are so familiar to all of us, they are handy symbols. Because they are such handy symbols their meanings are multiple and unpredictable. 4 Again, we should be paying attention to this stuff. Our windows are actors in a silent play, and they are part of the stage set against which we live our lives. As part of the set, they influence us and we interact with them, both performatively and symbolically. When we make windows we are creating significant social mediators and we are leaving a trace of a particular idea about society. There are different implications to a wide window, a tall window, a slot window or a clerestory. Some windows these days come with built-in blinds; some have large, unimpeded panes of glass, others are subdivided by mullions and grilles. Some windows have deep sills, others don’t. While both meaning and use are unpredictable, we can’t conclude that to be deliberate is pointless and thus allow economics and fashion be our sole guides. People may veil their window with fabric, and peer through the slats of the blinds or a hole in the curtain. They may leave the window naked, baring their life to others. Some may use their window to communicate things, to declare affiliations and affinities; some place artefacts in their window for others to see, others may use their open window as a backdrop to their private world, a variegated, changing wallpaper. Windows will be modified and they will have myriad interpretations. Despite this, the shape of a window remains a positing of a particular inhabitant and a particular public. Designers must be clear what these positions are as they set the scene and action starts. c
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