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Donald Maurice Kreis
Fellow citizens! As Thomas Jefferson once memorably
wrote: When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for
a people to cast off the bars that imprison them, a decent respect
for the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare
the causes which impel them to the separation.
Okay, maybe that's not an exact quote from the Declaration
of Independence, but circumstances have changed. Jefferson was concerned
not with prison bars but with certain "political bands"
that threatened American freedom. But Jefferson was also an architect
- his home at Monticello and his campus at the University of Virginia
are classic American designs - and today America is being oppressed
by bands of a different sort: fake muntins - those confining and
ultimately imprisoning bars that desecrate so many windows in the
Upper Valley and elsewhere in communities where traditional architecture
holds sway.
The key to shedding this tyranny is distinguishing
the true from the false, aesthetically speaking - and placing that
distinction in the context of why windows exist and how their technology
has evolved. It's the difference between the 1799 Strafford Meeting
House, whose mighty 20 over 20 windows (meaning 20 panes in the
upper sash and 20 panes in the lower) make it among Vermont's most
striking buildings of any era, and the shopping mall that uses snap-in
muntins to fool people into thinking the building was designed with
anything other than expediency in mind.
"When we talk about windows with clients, discussing
muntins takes up most of the time," confesses Andrew Garthwaite,
whose Norwich architectural firm - Haynes & Garthwaite - has
built its reputation on creating buildings that evoke the traditional
architecture of bygone eras. "A lot of what we talk about are
proportion and scale. We want the muntins to look real, not fake."
Garthwaite explains that, two centuries ago, glass
technology was such that large panes were an impossibility. Thus,
in order to use windows for their principal purpose of admitting
light into the interior of a building, muntins were a practical
necessity to achieve an opening of any significant size. Today,
points out Montpelier architect Gregg Gossens, whose design habits
are more contemporary than Garthwaite's, the imperative in window
design is to admit light without emitting heat during harsh New
England winters- and, because windows 'leak' heat from their edges,
small panes and real muntins are not simply an anachronism from
a time when glassmakers could not produce big panes, but also work
against current energy conservation requirements.
No wonder those client conferences of Garthwaite's
take so long. Garthwaite, incidentally, himself lives in a late
19th Century home which, despite what he calls "vaguely federal-style
detailing," sports windows with no muntins. "They look
terrific," he reports. Ever dedicated to historic accuracy,
he also points out that many 18th Century windows featured sashes
painted black or dark green - in an effort to make the non-glass
portions of the windows as invisible as possible.
Thus, if muntins are not an inevitability, even in
historic or historicist buildings, why do we long for them? A clue
comes from Boston architect Jonathan Hale, whose 1994 book, The
Old Way of Seeing, argues that "everyday architecture began
to slip" after 1830, when people began to believe that "magic
was not to be expected in everyday life." According to Hale,
what architecture lost at that juncture was a generalized commitment
to principles of proportion and beauty. Thus, he argues, "something
is absent from the everyday buildings of our time . . . . We may
complain about it, but in the end, we don't expect our buildings
to have that spark we see in the buildings of the past."
"I do sneer at snap-in muntins," Hale admitted
in an interview. But, he adds, "I don't think honesty is the
most important thing about windows. How they look and how they function
are more important."
"What I am most interested in is the lines of
the house," Hale asserts. So, when the muntins add lines that
yield a sense of proportion to a contemporary design, he will suffer
their lack of authenticity, given that technology no longer renders
them a necessity. Generally, architects agree, traditional windows
with muntins tend to look right in buildings with a vertical orientation
- i.e., a project that is taller than it is wide - because in those
instances the ratio of height to width employs the so-called Golden
Section, a mathematical relationship that evokes proportions seen
in the human body and other living things. It is this inherently
pleasing spatial relationship that makes the statuesque Strafford
Meeting House - and its windows - so enjoyable to the eye. You can
try to impose this Golden Section, via windows with fake muntins,
on a one-story building like so many of the automobile-friendly
commercial structures that currently blight the landscape, but in
those instances the note rings inherently false.
Moreover, the technological obsolescence of muntins,
and the fact that their use is often a kind of artificial imposition
of vertical orientation on a horizontal designs, are not the only
reasons why it is difficult to capture in a modern building the
majesty of 18th Century windows. A related problem concerns the
quality of glass itself. "One of the problems with new buildings
is that the glass is so pure that you don't get much to look at,"
Hale notes. "You can spend a fortune on glass with imperfections.
It looks wonderful. But is it authentic?"
"Old, wavy glass tends to scatter the light,"
agrees Garthwaite. "That's why a historic interior has a luminous
quality."
Hale's solution to the authenticity problem is never
to use fake muntins in his designs; when he feels like the proportions
call for windows of that sort, he specifies real ones. But Garthwaite
points out that windows and glazed doors (i.e., doors containing
windows) generally account for fully ten percent of a project budget
- a figure that can easily double when a design requires custom
windows with things like real muntins and historically accurate
glass.
Fortunately for those who are bold enough to break
out of fake muntins in quest of modern windows that capture some
of what Hale calls "the old way of seeing" in a manner
that is authentic, the Upper Valley contains some interesting examples
easily accessible in the public domain. At Dartmouth's Hood Museum,
designed by Charles Moore, the windows make a jazzy kind of music
that provide the decisively whimsical quality to the building's
various facades. In particular, the windows of the interior courtyard
contains muntins that are self-consciously not "real"
in the sense of necessary to hold small panes of glass in place.
Rather, the these green dividing lines, some of which are clearly
embedded between the layers of thermally broken (i.e, insulated)
glass, add a sense of scale and uniformity to a set of windows that
vary, height-wise, in a manner that might seem arbitrary without
the unifying gesture.
Next door, at the Hopkins Center, are windows that
Garthwaite particularly admires. He calls them "sculptural"
and "nicely divided." The Hopkins features grand picture
windows, separated by muntins that provide a rectangular pattern
as a counterpoint to the arches that are the building's dominant
theme, with gracefully curving glass at the lobby level that serves
as the buildings pediment or base. The Hop's architect, Wallace
K. Harrison, employed a similar tension in the building for which
his Dartmouth project became the prototype: his Metropolitan Opera
House at Lincoln Center in New York. Harrison, incidentally, may
have been among his profession's greatest proponents of architecture
as sculpture, from the huge Trylon and Perisphere symbols he designed
for the 1939 New York World's Fair to his Empire State Plaza in
Albany, a series of skyscrapers grouped around an auditorium building
that resembles an egg.
In fairness, famous architects sometimes make fenestration
flubs when seeking to explore the sculptural properties of glass.
Dartmouth's new Moore Psychology Building, designed by the recently
appointed Yale architecture school dean Robert A.M. Stern, features
an oversized and elaborate arched window, high above the main entrance.
Moore is an otherwise sedate structure, perhaps even nondescript,
but Stern and his staff are fans of gestures and ornamentation,
and apparently could not resist this one flourish.
According to one local architect, the window appears
to be "swelling," in a manner that would justify cold
compresses if the building were a person. Nor does this swollen
appendage become justified from the interior; its light and views
accrue not to some grand space but to a small library and lounge
area that is no doubt the domain of the faculty members who prevailed
upon Dartmouth to commission the project in the first place.
If this leaves you skeptical about whether the famous
architects are able to solve the problem of designing functional
and beautiful windows without resorting to gimmickry like fake muntins,
there is still hope in the vernacular. When architects use the word
"vernacular" to refer to a building, they are alluding
to designs that are created and executed by non-architects, and
also to design elements that become accepted an ubiquitous as a
result. Among the best and most refreshing examples is the "lazy
window."
Lots of traditional dwellings in the Upper Valley
are constructed in a big house-little house configuration, with
side-gabled roofs - that is, with roofs that slope toward the front
and back of the building. The intersection of the big house and
the little house typically leaves a portion of the big-house's gable
- the wall space immediately beneath the roof - exposed. Inside
is a stuffy attic room that desperately needs a window. Breaking
the roof line with a dormer would be expensive and distracting,
but the exposed portion of the adjacent gable is typically too small
for the insertion of a regular, vertically oriented window.
So someone, whose identity has been consigned to oblivion,
hit on the bold idea of taking an off-the shelf window and tilting
it so that it fits snugly into the gable wall between the roof above
and the roof of the little house adjacent and below. It's jaunty,
whimsical, intriguing and, as Garthwaite points out, highly practical
- because, unlike many smaller windows that could be inserted into
such spaces without being tilted, lazy windows can open and close
to provide welcome ventilation to their attic domain. Lazy windows
have the "spark" that Hale finds missing in so much post-1830s
architecture.
"They're sort of amusing. We're putting one in
right now," Garthwaite says, to capture for his client what
would otherwise be a lost view of a small pond. But architects,
at least Vermont architects, don't like to call them lazy windows.
"In Vermont they're called New Hampshire windows," he
explains. It is an association that the Granite State should not
be ashamed to claim.
Would Jefferson embrace lazy windows if he could see
what has been built in the republic he wrought? Could he appreciate
the adventurous fenestration of the Hood Museum? Or would he have
us resort to snap-in muntins in our big insulated panes, the better
to imitate the classical and neoclassical models he himself revered?
He has left us few clues - except, perhaps, this excerpt from a
1785 letter to James Madison.
Architecture, Jefferson said, "it is an enthusiasm
of which I am not ashamed, as its object is to improve the taste
of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile them
to the rest of the world, and procure them its praise." In
other words, Jefferson thought that great American design would
inspire American greatness generally. As the man who exhorted Americans
to proclaim self-evident truths about life, liberty and pursuit
of happiness, he would hardly approve of anything so false as fake
muntins. Therefore, to the task of snapping them out of our windows,
we should mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes
and our sacred honor.
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