The process of watching the street from upper story windows is strongly embedded in traditional Peruvian culture in the form of the mirador, the beautiful ornamented gallery which sticks out over the street from many of the colonial buildings in Lima. Peruvian girls especially love to watch the street, but only if they are not too visible. They can watch the street from the mirador without any impropriety, something they cannot do so easily from the front door. If anyone looks at them too hard, they can pull back into the window.
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| 164 STREET WINDOWS |
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| The mirador—the lookout. |
Street windows are most successful on the second and third floors. Anything higher, and the street becomes a “view”—the vitality of the connection is destroyed. From the second and third floors people can shout down to the street, throw down a jacket or a ball; people in the street can whistle for a person to come to the window, and even glimpse the expressions on a person’s face inside.
At ground level, street windows are less likely to work. If they are too far back from the street, they don’t really give a view onto the street—though of course they still give light. If they are too close to the street, they don’t work at all, because they get boarded up or curtained to protect the privacy of the rooms inside —see the empirical findings presented in Houses Generated by Patterns, Center for Environmental Structure, 1969, pp. 179—80.
One possible way of making a street window at ground level might be to build an alcove, two or three steps up, with a window on the street, its window-sill five feet above the street. People in the alcove, can lean on the window sill, and watch the street; people in the street can see them, without being able to see into the room behind them. It is even easier, of course, if the
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| An alcove street window at ground level. |
BUILDINGS
ground floor of the house is two or three feet above the street, as many ground floors are.
Finally, on whatever floor it is, a street window must be placed in a position which the people inside pass often, a place where they are likely to pause and stand beside the window: the head of a stair, the bay window of a favorite room, a kitchen, bedroom, or window in a passage.
Therefore:
Where buildings run alongside busy streets, build windows with window seats, looking out onto the street. Place them in bedrooms or at some point on a passage or stair, where people keep passing by. On the first floor, keep these windows high enough to be private.
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On the inside, give each of these windows a substantial place, so that a person feels encouraged to sit there or stand and watch the street—window place (180); make the windows open outward—windows which open wide (236) ; enrich the outside of the window with flower boxes and climbing plants—then people, in the course of caring for the flowers, will have the opportunity for hanging out—filtered light (238), climbing PLANTS (24.6) ....
| 165 OPENING TO THE STREET* |
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. . . many places in a town depend for their success on complete exposure to the people passing by—far more exposure than a street window (164) can provide, university as a marketplace (43), LOCAL TOWN HALL (44), NECKLACE OF COMMUNITY PROJECTS (45), MARKET OF MANY SHOPS (46), HEALTH CENTER (47), STREET CAFE (88), BUILDING THOROUGHFARE (iOl) are
all examples. This pattern defines the form of the exposure.
The sight of action is an incentive for action. When people can see into spaces from the street their world is enlarged and made richer, there is more understanding; and there is the possibility for communication, learning.
The service center is a storefront, with the windows all along- the front. A man walks past the door. As he does so, he looks into the center, but only turns his head for a second—apparently unwilling to show too great a curiosity. He then sees a notice on the window, stops to read the notice. As he stands reading it, he looks past the notice to see what is going on inside. After a few seconds he retraces his steps, and comes into the center. (A Pattern Language Which Generates Multi-Service Centers, C.E.S., 1968, p. 251.)
There are many ways of establishing connection with the street.
1. First, the obvious case: the wall along the street is made essentially of glass, and the view in is of some inviting activity. A community center in Berkeley moved from a rennovated house which was away from the street, to a rennovated furniture showroom which was completely transparent to the street. The number of people dropping in soared after the move. It was partly because the new location was on a much busier pedestrian street. But transparency also played a role in bringing people in: of the people walking past the center about 66 per cent turned and looked in, and about 7 per cent stopped—either to read a notice or to look into the interior more carefully.
2. However, a glass connection creates relatively passive involvement. By comparison, a wall which is actually open—with a sliding wall or shutter—creates a far more valuable and involving
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I 65 OPENING TO THE STREET
connection. When the wall is open it is possible to hear what is going on inside, to smell the inside, to exchange words, and even to step in all along the opening. Street cafes, open food stalls, workshops with garage door openings are examples.
We passed the workshop every day on our way home from school. It was a furniture shop, and we would stand at the opening and watch men building chairs and tables, sawdust dying, forming legs on the lathe. There was a low wall, and the foreman told us to stay outside it> but he let us sit there, and we did, sometimes for hours.
3. The most involving case of alclass="underline" activity is not only open to sight and sound on one side of the path, but some part of the activity actually crosses the path, so that people who walk down the sidewalk find themselves walking through the activity. The extreme version is the one where a shop is set up to straddle the path, with goods displayed on either side. A more modest version is the one where the roof of the space covers the path, the wall is entirely open, and the paving of the path is continuous with the “interior” of the space.
No matter how the opening is formed, it is essential that it expose the ordinary activity inside in a way that invites people passing to take it in and have some relationship, however modest, to it. The doctors of the Pioneer Health Center in Peckham believed this principle to be so essential that they deliberately built the center’s gymnasium, swimming pool, dance floor, cafeteria, and theater in such a way that people passing could not help but see others, often people they knew, inside:
. . . dancing goes on there and moving figures can be seen on the floor of the main building at night when the whole building is lit up attracting the attention of the passers by. . . .
... it must be remembered that it is not the action of the skilled alone that is to be seen in the Centre, but every degree of proficiency in all that is going on. This point is crucial to an understanding of how vision can work as a stimulus engendering action in the company gathering there. In ordinary life the spectator of any activity is apt to be presented only with the exhibition of the specialist; and this trend has been gathering impetus year by year with alarming progression. Audiences swell in their thousands to watch the expert game, but as the “stars” grow in brilliance, the conviction of an in-