The Window: Weather’s Mediator
Jinpeng (Jonathan) Zhang

- SP.17
- Level: undergraduate
- Discipline: Architecture
- Instructor: Hadrian Predock
The window is the fundamental architectural element that mediates the relationship between interior and exterior, and between external weather and the internal human viewer. The window is one of the most intimate tissues of architecture in relation to weather. Air passes through it, rain patters against its surface and runs down it, snow accumulates along its eaves, and condensation builds up on the glass pane. With the advent of the first notion of a window, to its subsequent development over millennia, our relationship with weather has changed. The size, shape, placement, quality of glass, and other variable qualities of the window effect how the world appears to us. It logically follows that this changing experience of weather leads to a changing experience of interior space as a whole. In exploring this changing experience, this project carries us through key disciplinary moments in the history of the window, and the conceptual developments related to weather.