The Window

Eleven Rooms

Chapter 17: The Window

The window is the building's eye. The window is the opening through which the building sees the world and through which the world sees the building and through which the person inside the building sees everything, the sky and the trees and the mountains and the light, the light most of all, the light that is the window's primary gift, the thing the window exists to admit, the thing the building exists to receive, and the receiving is the architecture, and the window is the instrument of the receiving, the aperture through which the world pours into the room and the room opens to the world, and the pouring and the opening are the same act, seen from different sides of the glass.

Miriam designed the patient room windows for Orchard House on a morning in late November, the last week of the month, the week when the daylight in Portland had contracted to nine hours and the morning light arrived late and left early and the hours of darkness expanded to fill the spaces the light had vacated, the darkness occupying the morning and the evening the way water occupies a vessel, completely, indiscriminately, the darkness not malicious but thorough, and the thoroughness of the November darkness made Miriam think about windows, made her think about the light she was designing for a building in Bend where the daylight was also contracting but where the quality of the remaining light was different, clearer, sharper, the high-desert light that cut through the dry air without the softening filter of Portland's marine layer, the light that arrived at the window undiffused, unscattered, the light that was itself, purely, the light that the low-iron glass would admit without the green tint of standard glass, the light that would fall on the bed and on the person in the bed and would be the color of the morning, the actual color, the true color, the color that the world was offering through the window that Miriam was designing on this dark November morning in Portland.

She drew the windows on a new sheet of trace paper, the sheet laid over the floor plan, the windows drawn as openings in the east walls of the patient rooms, the openings she had marked on the first sketch as dashes, as gestures, as the initial indications of where the light would enter, and now the dashes became dimensions, became specifications, became the precise measurements that would govern the fabrication of the glass and the construction of the frames and the installation of the units in the walls that James's crew would build.

Sixty-six inches wide. Eighty-four inches tall. Floor-to-ceiling on the east wall.

She had never specified floor-to-ceiling windows for patient rooms before. At Evergreen House, the windows were sixty inches wide and seventy-two inches tall, set eighteen inches above the floor, a configuration that was generous but not total, that admitted the light while maintaining a sill, a ledge, a horizontal surface that separated the floor from the window and that provided the psychological boundary between the interior and the exterior, the sill saying: the inside is here, below this line, and the outside is there, above this line, and the boundary is the sill, and the sill is the separation.

But Orchard House would not have sills. Orchard House would have floor-to-ceiling glass on the east wall of every patient room, the glass beginning at the floor and rising to the ceiling, eighty-four inches of uninterrupted transparency, the room's east wall not a wall at all but a window, a surface of glass that dissolved the boundary between inside and outside, that said: there is no separation, there is no sill, there is no line between the room and the world, the room and the world are continuous, the floor of the room extends to the edge of the glass and the glass extends to the edge of the world and the world is there, is right there, is as close as the glass, and the glass is nothing, is invisible, is the absence of wall, is the presence of opening, is the window's ultimate expression of its purpose, which is to admit everything.

She had decided on floor-to-ceiling glass during the site visit in September, when she had stood on the property and looked at the mountains and the sky and the morning light and had felt the largeness of the Bend landscape, the expansiveness that the high desert offers, the sense that the world goes on in every direction with a clarity and a distance that the Willamette Valley, with its close hills and its low clouds, does not provide. The Bend landscape demanded a larger window. The Bend light demanded a larger opening. The mountains demanded to be seen fully, not framed by a sill and a header but held in the full height of the glass, the peaks and the foothills and the sky above and the ground below all visible, all present, all available to the person in the bed who looked east and saw, through the floor-to-ceiling glass, the world.

The glass: low-iron, as specified in the materials meeting with James. Double-paned, with a low-emissivity coating on the interior surface of the outer pane, the coating reflecting the room's heat back into the room while admitting the sun's heat from outside, the thermal management that the Bend climate required, the winters cold enough to demand the insulating value of the double pane and the low-E coating, the technology allowing the large window without the energy penalty that a large window would otherwise impose, because large windows lose heat, large windows are thermal liabilities, large windows are the things that mechanical engineers argue against and that building codes restrict and that energy consultants flag as problems, and Miriam had fought for large windows in every building, had fought the mechanical engineers and the codes and the consultants, had argued that the energy penalty of a large window is offset by the human benefit of a large window, and the human benefit is not quantifiable in BTUs or R-values but is quantifiable in the quality of the dying person's last view, which is the view through the window, which is the world, which is the thing the dying person is leaving, and the size of the window determines how much of the world the dying person sees, and Miriam wanted them to see as much as possible, wanted them to see everything, wanted them to see the full height of the mountains and the full depth of the sky and the full breadth of the morning light, and the full required floor-to-ceiling, required the elimination of the sill, required the dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside, required the window to become the wall.

She drew the window details. The frame: thermally broken aluminum, anodized in a dark bronze finish that would recede against the exterior cladding, the frame minimized, the frame designed to be invisible, to disappear, to leave only the glass, because the frame is the window's edge and the edge should not be seen, the edge should not intrude on the view, the edge should be the thinnest possible line between the room and the world, and the thinnest possible line was one and a half inches, the width of the thermally broken aluminum frame that the window manufacturer had developed, the frame narrow enough to vanish at any distance greater than three feet, the frame becoming invisible to the person in the bed who looked at the window from the bed's position, twelve feet from the glass, and saw not the frame but the view, not the edge but the world.

The operability: the lower thirty inches of the window would open. A casement mechanism, hinged at the side, opening outward, the opening allowing the outside air to enter the room, the breeze to reach the bed, the sound of the wind in the remaining apple trees to reach the ear of the patient who was lying in the bed and looking through the glass, and the sound of the wind was a sound of the outside, a sound that the room could not produce, a sound that required the window to open, and the opening was the room's acknowledgment that the dying are still in the world, still connected to the world, still part of the world's air and wind and temperature, and the connection should not be severed by the glass, the glass should be openable, should be permeable, should allow the inside and the outside to mix, to combine, the room's air and the world's air becoming one air, and the one air would carry the smell of juniper and sage and the dry high-desert scent that the Bend wind carries, and the smell would enter the room and mix with the smell of the cork floor and the wood trim and the cooking from the kitchen, and the mixing was the design, was the architecture, the architecture of the permeable, the architecture that admits rather than excludes, the architecture that opens rather than closes.

She specified the glass's solar heat gain coefficient: 0.27. She specified the visible light transmittance: 0.70. She specified the U-factor: 0.25. She specified the condensation resistance: 65. Each number was a performance metric, a measure of how the glass would behave in the Bend climate, how much heat it would admit, how much light it would transmit, how much insulation it would provide, how much condensation it would resist, and each metric was a negotiation between competing demands -- the demand for light and the demand for thermal comfort, the demand for transparency and the demand for insulation, the demand for the view and the demand for the energy budget -- and the negotiation was the design, the design being the resolution of competing demands into a single specification, a single number that balanced all the demands and satisfied none of them completely and satisfied all of them sufficiently.

She finished the window specifications at noon. She capped the pen. She looked at the drawing.

Sixteen windows. Sixteen openings in sixteen east walls. Sixteen surfaces of low-iron, double-paned, low-E coated, thermally broken, floor-to-ceiling glass through which the morning light would enter sixteen patient rooms and fall on sixteen beds and touch sixteen faces, the faces of the people who would die in these rooms, in this building, in the light that entered through these windows, and the light would be the color of the morning, the true color, the undistorted color, the color that the low-iron glass admitted without adding its own tint, and the color would change with the season and the weather and the hour, the color a variable, the color the one thing the architect could not control, and the uncontrollability of the color was the window's freedom, the window's wildness, the window being the garden's cousin, the opening in the wall that admitted the uncontrolled the way the opening in the roof admitted the sky, and the uncontrolled was the world, and the world was what the dying needed to see, the world in its true colors, the world as it was.

She drove to Evergreen House.

It was morning. Early morning. She had driven from her apartment before dawn, had arrived at the hospice at six-fifteen, had signed the visitor's log in the lobby's dim light, had walked the corridor past the amber night-lights that were still on, the morning not yet having triggered the photosensors that switched the corridor from night mode to day mode, and she had pushed open the door to Room 6 and she had entered the room and she had sat in the visitor's chair and she had waited.

She waited for the light.

The east-facing window of Room 6 held the pre-dawn sky, the dark sky, the sky that was not yet light and not yet dark but somewhere between, the sky in transition, the sky changing from the state of night to the state of day, and the changing was visible, was occurring, was happening as Miriam watched, the sky's darkness receding like a tide, the darkness withdrawing from the eastern horizon, the darkness pulling back to reveal the lighter sky beneath, the lighter sky that was the first evidence of the sun's approach, the sun still below the horizon, still hidden by the earth's curvature, but the light arriving before the sun, the way a messenger arrives before a dignitary, the light preceding the sun the way the smell of cooking precedes the food, the announcement before the thing, the promise before the fulfillment.

Lin was asleep. Or Lin was not asleep but was lying with her eyes closed, resting in the state between sleeping and waking that the dying inhabit more and more frequently as the dying progresses, the state that is not sleep and not wakefulness but something else, a third state, a state that the medical literature calls drowsiness but that Miriam thought of as threshold, the threshold state, the state of being on the edge of something, the edge of consciousness, the edge of the room, the edge between the inside and the outside, the edge that the window represents, and Lin was on the edge, was at the threshold, was in the state between.

The light came.

It came the way it always came, the way it had come every morning since the earth began turning, the way it would come every morning after this morning, the way it came regardless of what was happening in the rooms it entered, regardless of the dying and the grieving and the waiting and the sleeping, the light indifferent to human experience, the light obedient only to physics, to the angle of the earth's axis relative to the sun's position, to the atmosphere's density and composition, to the particulate matter suspended in the air that scattered the short wavelengths and transmitted the long wavelengths and produced the warm color of dawn, the gold that was not gold but the selective transmission of wavelengths between 570 and 590 nanometers, the physical fact of color, the objective reality of the subjective experience of beauty, and the beauty was there, was present, was entering Room 6 through the east-facing window at six-forty-two on a November morning in Portland, Oregon.

The light came through the window. Through the sixty inches of width and the seventy-two inches of height, through the low-iron glass that Miriam had specified, the glass that admitted the color without distortion, that showed the gold as gold, the pink as pink, the blue as blue, each color true, each wavelength unaltered, the glass transparent in the most complete sense, the glass doing what glass does best, which is nothing, which is getting out of the way, which is allowing the light to pass as though the glass were not there, and the as-though-not-there is the glass's highest achievement, the achievement of invisibility, of self-effacement, of the material that succeeds by disappearing.

The light fell on the bed.

The light fell on the bed and on Lin. The light fell on the white sheet and turned the white to gold. The light fell on Lin's face and the face received the light the way all faces receive light, passively, openly, the skin a surface that the light illuminates without asking and that the light transforms without intending, because light transforms everything it touches, light changes the color and the temperature and the visibility of everything it falls upon, and the transformation is not intentional but physical, is not a choice but a consequence, the consequence of photons striking a surface and being absorbed or reflected, and the absorbed photons become warmth and the reflected photons become color and the warmth and the color together become the experience of the light on the face, the experience of lying in a bed in a room that faces east and receiving the morning sun through the window.

Lin opened her eyes. She opened them slowly, the way the dying open their eyes, not with the sudden alertness of the well but with the gradual emergence of the threshold state, the eyes opening like a door opening, slowly, on hydraulic hinges, the opening revealing not the room but the light, because the light was the first thing the opening eyes saw, the light was the thing that filled the visual field before the visual field organized itself into shapes and surfaces and the familiar geometry of the room, and the light was gold, and the gold was the morning, and the morning was the window, and the window was the architecture, and the architecture was Miriam, and Miriam was sitting in the chair beside the bed watching the light fall on her mother's face.

The meeting of light and person in the room Miriam designed was the thing. It was the thing she had designed ten buildings toward without knowing she was designing toward it. The moment when the architect's intention and the resident's need became the same thing. The moment when the design and the experience converged, when the drawing and the inhabiting were no longer separate, when the trace paper and the bed were the same, when the pen line and the light ray were the same, when the window and the eye were the same, and the same thing was light, was always light, was the light that entered through the opening the architect had placed in the wall for exactly this purpose, which was this moment, which was every moment like this moment, every morning in every room in every building she had designed, the light entering and falling on the bed and touching the face and the touching being the architecture's completion, the architecture's fulfillment, the thing the building had been waiting for since the first line on the trace paper.

Lin looked at the light. She looked at the window. She looked at the morning.

"The light," she said.

"Yes," Miriam said.

"This is what you design."

"Yes."

"This is what you've been designing for twenty-two years. Not buildings. Not rooms. Not windows. This. The light on the face. The morning on the bed. This moment. This is the thing."

Miriam did not speak. She could not speak. She could not speak because her mother had said the thing, had named the thing, had catalogued the thing that Miriam had spent twenty-two years designing toward without being able to name it, the thing that was not the building and not the room and not the window but the light, the light that the building received and the room held and the window admitted, the light that was the final element, the thing the architect could not create but could only receive, could only design the receiving of, and the designing of the receiving was the architecture, was the entire architecture, was the whole of Miriam's career reduced to its essence, which was this: a window facing east, a bed beneath the window, a person in the bed, and the light, the morning light, the gold light, the light that fell on the face and was the face's last beauty.

The light moved. The light moved the way light moves, slowly, the angle changing as the sun climbed, the gold shifting to warm white, the warm white shifting to clear white, the dawn becoming morning, the morning becoming day, the color temperature climbing from twenty-eight hundred Kelvin to four thousand to five thousand, the light losing its warmth and gaining its clarity, the transformation gradual, continuous, the light always changing, always moving, always different from one minute to the next, and the constant changing was the light's life, the light's vitality, and the vitality entered the room through the window and filled the room and the room was alive with light, was animated by light, was the light's vessel, the light's recipient, the light's home.

Lin watched the light change. She watched it with the attention of a person who had time, who had nothing but time, who had been relieved of every obligation and every task and every responsibility except the obligation to be here, in this room, in this bed, in this light, and the being-here was enough, was the only task, the only obligation, the only thing the dying had to do, which was to be present, which was to receive the light, which was to lie in the bed and watch the morning enter through the window and know that the morning was beautiful and that the beauty was available and that the availability was the architecture, the architecture that Miriam had designed, the east-facing window that let in the light that fell on the bed that held the person who watched the morning, and the watching was the thing, the watching was the architecture, the watching was the reason the window existed.

"In the new building," Lin said. "The windows."

"Floor-to-ceiling," Miriam said. "Eighty-four inches tall. No sill. The glass goes from the floor to the ceiling. The whole wall is glass."

"Floor-to-ceiling," Lin repeated. "Good. More light. More sky. More world."

"Yes."

"More of everything."

"Yes."

"The dying should see as much as possible. The dying should see everything. The window should not frame the world, Miriam. The window should be the world. The window should dissolve. The window should disappear. The window should become nothing, should become air, should become the absence of wall, and the absence of wall should be the presence of everything, and the everything should enter the room, should fill the room, should be the room, and the room should be the world, and the world should be the light."

Miriam looked at her mother. The retired librarian. The professional cataloguer. The woman who had spent forty years organizing knowledge into categories, shelving information in its proper place, building the walls of the library's structure one book at a time, one card at a time, one subject heading at a time. And now the walls were dissolving. Now the categories were merging. Now the shelves were opening and the books were flying and the knowledge was free, was uncontained, was in the air, was in the light, and Lin was in the light, was part of the light, was the surface that the light fell on, was the face that received the morning, was the person in the room that the window admitted the world into, and the admitting was the architecture, and the architecture was the light, and the light was everything, was always everything, was the first thing and the last thing and the thing between, the thing that entered through the window that Miriam had designed and that fell on the bed that Miriam had specified and that touched the face of the woman who had made Miriam, who had raised Miriam, who had watched Miriam design ten buildings and ten sets of windows and who was now lying in the eleventh room -- no, the seventh, Evergreen House was the seventh -- lying in the room her daughter had designed, in the light her daughter had admitted, and the light was the gift, was the architect's last gift, was the thing the architect could give that the daughter could not, because the daughter could not stop the dying and the architect could not stop the dying but the architect could design the light in which the dying happened, could design the window through which the last light entered, and the designing was the giving, and the giving was the love, and the love was the light.

It was always light.