WINDOW RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Zhangcun: The Needs of the Underground Part 2

I’ve come to realize that meeting with elders is the best way to learn about their village. Walking through a loess land of beautiful green …

Houses beyond the Places of Scenic Beauty (2)

Repeating myself the phrase “your house” in Chinese the old man and I walked for about 40 minutes through a town located outside of the scen…

Zhangcun, “needs of underground” Part 1

A square hole on dry ocherous land. People live inside that hole. I stopped in on the village of Zhangcun in Sanmenxia City Henan. It is loc…

“Placing” a Home: East Gilan, Iran (Part 1)

Iran was an unknown land to me before I visited it myself. My vague image of it had been of a desolate desert dotted with ancient remains. A…

Houses beyond the Places of Scenic Beauty (1)

We arrive at the town of Wuzhen in northern Zhejiang after a two-hour bus ride from Shanghai. This is an area famous for its beautiful river…

Shanghai, Bars of Iron Sprouting from Windows (2)

My steps become lighter now that I’ve decided what I’ll look for. This is the beginning of a trip to search for bars of iron. Ten steps out …

Part 1: Yoshiharu Tsukamoto “Window Behaviorology”

“Human behaviors are the best design resources.” Architect Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Atelier Bow-Wow/Professor Tokyo Institute of Technology) has…

Vino Santo in Trentino

Drive a car east from Milan go north through Verona and you will see the largest lake in Italy Lake Garda. Continue running north along the …

Shanghai, Bars of Iron Sprouting from Windows (1)

Arriving in Shanghai I was surprised at how noisy it was. This is not a critique: Shanghai is the type of place that if you don’t assert you…

Kibber, India : The Hidden Hole (part 2)

It was cold in the morning so high above sea level. But when I walked out to the third-floor terrace at my inn I found it surprisingly warm.…

Water Tanks in New York

Photographer Takashi Homma splices compelling shots of windows between his own photos and text. Second article of his “Windows and Photograp…

Kibber, India : The Hidden Hole (part 1)

Climbing even higher past Kinnaur district in North India I passed the treeline to find an outstretched land of nothing but brown rocky moun…

Kinnaur District, North India: The Overhanging Village (Part 3)

I walked back to the home in the small village in order to pick up the pants that had been sewn for me overnight. It seemed that there the m…

Kinnaur District, North India: The Overhanging Village (Part 2)

Many valley-side settlements located 2-3000 meters above sea level can be found in the district of Kinnaur. Busses run daily even here in th…

The Overhanging Village : Kinnaur District, India, Part 1

In the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh is a region inhabited by people known as the Kinnauris. It is a high-elevation region locat…

Takashi Homma + Alec Soth Thinking about Windows through Photography

Alec Soth who has taken many photos of “windows” in various parts of the world and Takashi Homma who has speculated on the relationships bet…

Floors and Floods: Siem Reap, Part 2

As I dug my bicycle’s tires into the sand they first moved me unsteadily forward until at last they no longer could. I had not yet rea…

Exhibition “Present State(ment)”

“En: art of nexus” is the theme of the Japan Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2016 one of t…

Sunny Loggia House

Chie Konno(t e c o)”Sunny Loggia House” The 15th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2016 “En: art of n…

Floors and Floods: Siem Reap, Part 1

Siem Reap is one of the cities in Cambodia along with Angkor Wat that is hopping with tourists who come to see the ancient ruins that lie th…

la fenêtre à la française

Six years have passed since I arrived in Paris. Although my daily life has been changing and evolving every moment Paris has kept the skylin…

The Red Earthenware Bowl: Eastern Tibet, Ser thar, Part 2

I descended to the center of Larung Gar where it seemed a lecture or assembly had just ended as priests were entering and leaving the buildi…

Part 3: Apertures for Walking Through

One way to use an aperture is to pass physical things through it. In most cases apertures are installed at the border between an inside spac…

Window Bookcase (1)

This project started when we commissioned o+h the young wife-and-husband team of architects Maki Onishi and Yuki Hyakuda to design a bookcas…

The Red Earthenware Bowl: Eastern Tibet, Ser thar, Part 1

I boarded a bus in Chengdu the capital city of the Chinese province of Sichuan and headed toward eastern Tibet. My destination was the Nying…

Part 2: Apertures for View

Apertures have many purposes of uses. They are used as light sources as ventilation and as portals through which people pass. In each of the…

A Desert Below Sea Level—Turpan, Part 2

I came across a group of grape-drying huts on a hill just off the settlement. These huts I had seen the day I arrived in Turpan while taking…

Part 1: Apertures for Light

Fleeting and weak though it is light in Scandinavia has a mysterious kind of allure to it. Could it not be that the peoples of Scandinavia w…

High-rise condos and windows—from functionality to scenery—

The Attractiveness of A View Partial Ocean View Ocean View Ocean Front. If upon hearing these words you know what they are referring to it i…

Windows as media — why we find looking through windows intriguing?—

We humans seem to enjoy the view we get from behind windows. Window seats on the bullet train on an airplane or in a café are always popular…

Window Bookcase (2)

This is the second entry on the Window Bookcase Project. We at the Window Research Institute asked o+h the architectural practice of Maki On…