The Picture Window

Definition

The picture window is Kent Bloomer's name — as assembled by Laura Garófalo-Khan's chapter — for the modern building's large glazed opening, analyzed as the emblem of a paradox at the heart of modern environmental design: the visual connection to landscape that "lacks an important haptic connection." The picture window's condition: "visual distantiation, physical separation, and even a sense of supremacy over nature" — glazing that "keeps out all discomfort and danger, yet allows one to view the non-human environment while preventing people from engaging with nature." And the condition compounds as buildings deepen: the picture window is "augmented by the 'extreme sensual disconnection from nature' found in the deep interior space made possible through well-engineered environmental and structural systems." The better the building performs, the less its occupants sense: the deep interior is climate-perfect and sense-poor.

Bloomer "does not contest the necessity of either the window or the deep interior. Instead, he proposes that small-scaled, repetitive, or rhythmic ornament that 'contests the material reality of the [modernist] box' be layered over the hard structure in order to subvert it, allowing for the multisensory experience necessary for effective biophilic design" (see performative-ornament). The picture window is thus the wiki's name for the modern interior's haptic deficit — the condition that biophilic ornament, the artificial-grotto's sensorial programme, and the sensorial-interior-landscape all answer. It connects the white-cube critique (the engineered environment that "provides less than full or lived body experience," per Drobnick's museum case — see white-cube) to domestic and building scale: the "pollution-free pristine state" is the deep interior's own condition raised to a display ideology.

Key Thinkers

• Kent Bloomer — the concept's author ("The Picture Window," in Biophilic Design, 2008, pp. 256–260, quoted throughout Garófalo-Khan's chapter); the diagnosis and the ornament cure; not yet paged (see log).
• Laura Garófalo-Khan — the transmission: the picture window as the diagnosis underlying the chapter's biophilic re-proposal of interior architecture.

Related Concepts

• biophilia — the diagnostic frame: the picture window as the failure-mode biophilic design targets.
• performative-ornament — the cure: ornament that "contests the material reality of the [modernist] box" and restores the haptic connection.
• optic-haptic-perception — the perceptual axis the window splits: full visual access to nature, near-zero tactile access.
• embodiment — what the window forecloses: "touching and the possibility of touching are critical to establishing the connection with nature that biophilia promotes."
• white-cube — the deep interior's institutional cousin: engineered purity as sensual disconnection.
• hermetic-seal — the McClures' name for the same modern boundary technology (air conditioning's "absolute boundary between inside and outside").
• inside-outside-dialectic — the window's dialectic: connection through separation — the outside seen but not felt.
• homogeneous-space — the modernist box whose material reality the ornament contests.
• artificial-grotto — the typological alternative: the interior that is itself landscape rather than a window onto it.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the concept's source: Bloomer's diagnosis ("visual distantiation, physical separation, and even a sense of supremacy over nature"; "extreme sensual disconnection from nature," p. 258 of the source essay via the chapter's notes) and the remedy that does not contest "the necessity of either the window or the deep interior."
• Boredom and Bedroom (Teyssot 1996/2006) — the window's optical antithesis: in Hummel's Drawing Room in Berlin the window shows no outside at all — "Both mirrors and windows, because they acquire the same luminosity and chromatic weight, become the same kind of object within this painterly representation. And, if the windows are mirrors, perhaps the exterior is a total illusion: there is no outside world" (p. 346). Where Bloomer's picture window grants "visual distantiation" (the outside seen but not felt), Teyssot's Biedermeier window grants none — the view returned to the room as reflection, the window functioning as mirror. The pairing dates the deep interior's problem backwards: the "extreme sensual disconnection from nature" has a nineteenth-century ancestor in an interior that abolished its outside optically before engineering abolished it thermally. See mirror, inwardness, inside-outside-dialectic.

Open Questions

• Bloomer accepts both the window and the deep interior as necessary — is the picture window then a permanent condition of modern interiors rather than a fixable defect, making biophilic ornament a permanent compensation rather than a solution?
• The window grants "a sense of supremacy over nature" — is the biophilic ornament programme therefore a way of undoing supremacy (submitting the box to ornament's life-like excess), and does that make biophilic design a political posture toward nature rather than a sensory technique?
• Is the deep interior's "extreme sensual disconnection from nature" the domestic, architectural form of the white cube's anosmia — and does one history (the engineered environment) explain both?