A window with a "window place" helps a person come to life.

Aconselho a todos os que se preocupam com o ambiente, com a existência física do que vos rodeia (sendo ou não estudantes de arquitectura), que leiam este livro do Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building.


"Everyone knows how beautiful a room is when it has a bay window in it, or a window seat, or a special ledge next to the window, or a small alcove which is entirely glassed. The feeling that rooms with these kinds of places in them are specially beautiful is not merely whimsy. It has a fundamental organic reason behind it.

When you are in a living room for any length of time, two of the many forces acting on you are the following:

1. You have a tendency to go towards the light. People are phototropic, biologically, so that it is often comfortable to place yourself where the light is.
2. If you are in the room for any length of time, you probably want to sit down, and make yourself comfortable.

In a room which has at least one window that is a "place" - a window seat, a bay window, a window with a wide low windowsill that invites you to pull your favorite chair over to it because you can see out so easily, a special ledge next to the window, or a small alcove which is entirely glassed - in this room you can give in to both forces: you can resolve the conflict for yourself.
In short, you can be comfortable.

But a room which has no window place, in which the windows are just "holes", sets up a hopeless inner conflict in me which I can't resolve.

If the windows are just holes in the wall, and there are no places where the windows are, one force pulls me towards the window; but another force pulls me toward the natural "places" in the room, where the comfortable chairs and tables are. So long as I am i this room, I am pushed and pulled by these two forces; there is nothing I can do to prevent the inner conflict they create in me.

The instinctive knowledge that a room is beautiful when it has a window place in it, is thus not a aesthetic whim. It is an instinctive expression of the fact that a room without window place is filled with actual, palpable organic tension; and that a room which has one lacks this tension, and is, from a simple organic point of view, a better place to live."

Christopher Alexander, "The Timeless Way of Building", capítulo 6, Patterns Which Are Alive.