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The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft
Honorable Mention, 2008 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. and 2007 Winner of the Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award at University of Southern California. As we spend more and more of our time staring at the screens of movies, televisions, computers, and handheld devices—"windows" full of moving images, texts, and icons—how the world is framed has become as important as what is in the frame. In The Virtual Window , Anne Friedberg examines the window as metaphor, as architectural component, and as an opening to the dematerialized reality we see on the screen.
In De pictura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti famously instructed painters to consider the frame of the painting as an open window. Taking Alberti's metaphor as her starting point, Friedberg tracks shifts in the perspectival paradigm as she gives us histories of the architectural window, developments in glass and transparency, and the emerging apparatuses of photography, cinema, television, and digital imaging. Single-point perspective—Alberti's metaphorical window—has long been challenged by modern painting, modern architecture, and moving-image technologies. And yet, notes Friedberg, for most of the twentieth century the dominant form of the moving image was a single image in a single frame. The fractured modernism exemplified by cubist painting, for example, remained largely confined to experimental, avant-garde work. On the computer screen, however, where multiple "windows" coexist and overlap, perspective may have met its end.
In this wide-ranging book, Friedberg considers such topics as the framed view of the camera obscura, Le Corbusier's mandates for the architectural window, Eisenstein's opinions on the shape of the movie screen, and the multiple images and nested windows commonly displayed on screens today. The Virtual Window proposes a new logic of visuality, framed and an architecture not only of space but of time.
In De pictura (1435), Leon Battista Alberti famously instructed painters to consider the frame of the painting as an open window. Taking Alberti's metaphor as her starting point, Friedberg tracks shifts in the perspectival paradigm as she gives us histories of the architectural window, developments in glass and transparency, and the emerging apparatuses of photography, cinema, television, and digital imaging. Single-point perspective—Alberti's metaphorical window—has long been challenged by modern painting, modern architecture, and moving-image technologies. And yet, notes Friedberg, for most of the twentieth century the dominant form of the moving image was a single image in a single frame. The fractured modernism exemplified by cubist painting, for example, remained largely confined to experimental, avant-garde work. On the computer screen, however, where multiple "windows" coexist and overlap, perspective may have met its end.
In this wide-ranging book, Friedberg considers such topics as the framed view of the camera obscura, Le Corbusier's mandates for the architectural window, Eisenstein's opinions on the shape of the movie screen, and the multiple images and nested windows commonly displayed on screens today. The Virtual Window proposes a new logic of visuality, framed and an architecture not only of space but of time.
- GenresNonfictionArtPhilosophy
357 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 4, 2017
oh so beauty
April 28, 2013
From the introduction:
The window is an opening, an aperture for light and ventilation. It opens it closes; it separates the spaces of here and there, inside and outside, in front of and behind. The window opens onto a three-dimensional world beyond: it is a membrane of where surface meets depth, where transparency meets its barriers. The window is also a frame, a proscenium: its edges hold a view in place. The window reduces the outside to a two-dimensional surface; the window becomes a screen. Like the window, the screen is at once a surface and a frame—a reflective plane onto which an image is cast and a frame that limits its view. The screen is a component piece of architecture, rendering a wall permeable to ventilation in new ways: a “virtual window” that changes the materiality of built space, adding new apertures that dramatically alter our conception of space and (even more radically) of time.
The window is an opening, an aperture for light and ventilation. It opens it closes; it separates the spaces of here and there, inside and outside, in front of and behind. The window opens onto a three-dimensional world beyond: it is a membrane of where surface meets depth, where transparency meets its barriers. The window is also a frame, a proscenium: its edges hold a view in place. The window reduces the outside to a two-dimensional surface; the window becomes a screen. Like the window, the screen is at once a surface and a frame—a reflective plane onto which an image is cast and a frame that limits its view. The screen is a component piece of architecture, rendering a wall permeable to ventilation in new ways: a “virtual window” that changes the materiality of built space, adding new apertures that dramatically alter our conception of space and (even more radically) of time.
March 17, 2013
SO. MANY. ENDNOTES.
The Architecture chapter is particularly enlightening. And while the points are frequently interesting I'm not sure it amounts to a point that can be summarized (or at least the conclusion doesn't suggest that it does). But it's a useful read.
The Architecture chapter is particularly enlightening. And while the points are frequently interesting I'm not sure it amounts to a point that can be summarized (or at least the conclusion doesn't suggest that it does). But it's a useful read.
April 21, 2013
Interesting. Especially Friedberg's in-depth treatment of the history of glass architecture and windows, etc. It was really interesting how it tied into the modernization and industrialization of buildings I am learning at the same time in my architecture class.
November 2, 2010
Impressively comprehensive, but its sweeping theoretical/historical scope makes for a sometimes painfully dense read.
December 20, 2014
Interesting ideas but it was an extremely challenging read
December 22, 2015
Brilliant book by a consummate master. Have used it as a text in several courses and it is always illuminating and worth the difficulty.
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March 16, 2018747.3 F8994 2009
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews