Discover Windows

About Discover Windows

Every room you have ever loved was shaped by where the light came in, and by how much wall was left around it. This is a magazine about that decision.

Walls do the obvious work. They hold things up, they keep weather out, they divide one purpose from another. The opening is where the argument starts. Cut a hole in a wall and you have introduced light, air, a view and a relationship with everything beyond the room, all at once, whether you intended all four or not. That is what makes the window such a peculiar object. It is the one element of a building whose job description is a list of things pulling in different directions, and the only one that most people interact with several times a day without ever quite naming what it is doing to them.

Ask someone to describe a room they loved and they rarely start with the floor. They say it was bright. They say the afternoon came in sideways. They say there was a deep sill where the cat sat, or a small square opening above the bench that framed a single branch. What they are describing, almost always, is an opening: its position, its proportion, its depth, and the quality of the light that arrived through it. The furniture has long since gone. The light is what stayed in the memory.

Almost every room widely agreed to be lovely is lit from more than one direction.

Before an opening does anything for the light, it does something to the wall.

The material that gives you everything is also the weakest part of the wall.

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