Against Windows

Three years after publishing a memoir about windows, Petra Hallway published a polemic against them. She has described this as 'a natural progression.' Her publisher described it as 'unexpected but not, in retrospect, surprising.'

The argument is not that windows are bad. The argument is that windows have come to represent something in contemporary architecture that they should not represent: transparency as virtue, exposure as honesty, visibility as openness. Hallway argues that the window, which began as an aperture for light and air, has been conscripted into a set of architectural politics that it cannot support and was not designed to bear.

The book includes a chapter about her own windows — the ones from the memoir — that she describes as the hardest thing she has written. She looks at the same windows and says something different about them.

'I was right about the windows,' she writes. 'I was wrong about what I was right about.'