Looking through axonometric windows

From Frank Lloyd Wright's box-breaking corner windows to Le Corbusier's fenêtre en longueur and Mies van der Rohe's reflective glass walls, modernist architectural space emerged through the transformation of the window. As a mechanism for articulating the primordial architectural distinction between inside and outside, the window has long been a primary architectural element. In modern architecture, however, the types of window multiplied in response to new technologies, structural systems and cultural conditions. The window increased in importance as architects explored its capacity not only to control the transmission of light, air, heat, vision and information, but also to produce different kinds of space and to transform social distinctions such as those between public and private, self and other. In this essay I present a little-known chapter in that story: the series of windows American architect Claude Bragdon designed in 1915 using his system of ‘projective ornament’ (Fig. 1).