Fenestration & Framing

I’m interested in the way that architectural apertures (windows, doors, columned porticos, etc.) allow the outside inside, albeit in an abridged or edited way. This relationship between fenestration and framing, I believe, extends beyond design, architecture, and construction into the realm of poetry, participatory poetry. Let’s see if I can begin to clarify this assertion today.

Let’s start with clarifying what I mean by fenestration. Most commonly used in architecture to refer to windows and doors, I will also include other apertures penetrating a building’s envelope as well as external elements like porticos and colonnades that similarly impact the interior/exterior viewing experience.

Fenestration defines what is viewed and how the view is framed. How much exterior enters the interior, and *how* does it enter? How is the exterior experienced from within the interior space?

In other words, architectural apertures in the building’s envelope are elements of permission and boundary that create a syntactical system for organizing and shaping experience. This act of mediation, of interpreting the view(s), is profoundly impactful to residents, visitors, etc. The person and the building are interacting. The void becomes a threshold or passage between environments, framing a specific rendering of the exterior world so that the person is effected. This curated experience has been edited to invoke interest, feelings, etc. not just from a single vantage point but from a variety of angles and distances from the aperture.

Often overlooked in design, I consider this experiential relationship between fenestration and framing to be one of the more intimate and seductive creative attributes and/or opportunities. The images in today’s post are intended to be illustrative, but I’ll ask them to stand on their own. For now, at least. Until I can improve my articulation of why Rosslyn offered such well conceived facades, and how we have tried to weigh quite heavily this aspect of our historic rehabilitation.

In closing, I’d like to note that these photographs were made on October 5, 2011 shortly after 9:30am. They’re all recorded in the boathouse, and they are part of a series of images I recorded to look at recovery progress after the 2011 floods.