It is through close up encounters with the materials, people, actions and systems associated with the highrise that we come to directly grasp a highrise ‘building event’. By building event we are thinking of the ways in which people and things work together to co-produce the residential highrise as a performed entity. This is to bring into view the diverse and interacting practical orders of a specific socio-technical building technology.  The fortunes of such performative events are diverse. Such encounters can produce interactions that ‘work’ as well as interactions that do not. Such interactions can contribute towards a building being deemed a success or a failure, as well as its ability to actually hold together or its propensity to fall apart. In this sense performativity and (building) performance are linked. Our interest in building events is, however, weighted towards understanding performativity in an open sense as opposed to adjudicating on performance (which, as we show, has been the preoccupation of much highrise social science).

We would like to start to explore our thinking about the building event by way of one specific building technology, that being the window and a specific event that happens in unison with the window, the view. The window is a set of design specifications, material components (glass, jambs, locks, frames), building regulations, technologies. In unison with a human user it becomes a purposeful aperture between the interior and exterior of a building: letting in light, ventilating, offering a view, providing other unplanned opportunities (an aperture to jump from or through which to throw rubbish). Although the window has many functions (intended and unintended) there is a specific relationship between window and view. The act of seeing is embedded in the term ‘window’, which derives from the Middle English vindauga, eye of the wind: ‘vindr’ (wind) and ‘auga’ (eye). The technology of the window is historically significant in the history of the highrise. Indeed, in the rise and fall highrise as a contemporary housing solution the window has played more than a bit part.