In the UK, too, the window played its part in the promotional hype that attended the arrival of the highrise housing solution. For example, the 1966 opening of the Red Road estate in Glasgow (once the tallest residential estate in Europe) was captured on the front page of local newspapers with this scene of the then Secretary of State for Scotland, William Ross, and his wife gazing out of an upper floor of a near completed highrise [image_6] . Just as the window marked a sign of hope at the start of Red Road, so too does the window have a bit part in the award winning noir surveillance thriller Red Road, filmed in one of the soon-to-be-demolished Red Road slab blocks [19].

To best understand the Red Road window it is important to set it into its specific material context - that of asbestos. Red Road’s unique steel frame construction depended upon the introduction of a fire insulating material, namely asbestos. As a result of the presence of asbestos, repair and replacement work of various kinds has produced specific safety issues for professionals and residents alike.  Above all else it has meant that the windows in Red Road remain to this day the original ones: single glazed steel frame windows.  Indeed the inability to replace windows is a key reason that Red Road has been deemed unviable longer term, for it has flow on effects for both fuel security and safety.

As part of our research into Red Road we explored residents interacting with various technologies: one such technology being the window. This interaction was solicited by way of the Show Us Your Home interview procedure and the specific prompt: ‘Show us your view’ or ‘Tell us about your view’.  This prompt clearly scripts the role of the window in a specific way – not simply as an aperture, but also (once working in unison with a resident, a visitor and a camera) a view. The highrise window is at once an aperture, as well as a type of wall (albeit glass). It is both a clear sheet of glass and a surface that has to be cleaned and curtained and around which continuous innovation occurs. It is also a place of risk, requiring devices to reduce that risk and rules of governance to determine that windows and residents behave together as they should.

We have been working with these filmed short encounters in order to try and understand what is assembled to produce the building event known as a view. We invite you now to view these ordinary window events, produced out of the interaction between the external world, the mediating devise of the window and its attendant inscriptions and matter, the resident, and us as filming interviewers. This aspect of the project is work in progress. What can be observed generally is the ambivalent relationship Red Road residents have to their windows, which are often both an aperture to an appreciated view, as well as a technology that is failing (drafty, hard to clean, broken locks, unsafe).

The window comes with asbestos. Red Road resident of 40 years [video_1].

Imagined windows. Now relocated Red Road resident of 20 years [video_2].

The windows are mank. Red Road resident of 40 years [video_3].

Not much of a view. Red Road resident of about 3 years, nurse and refugee [video_4].

NASS check the windows. Red Road resident of about 3 years, asylum seeker awaiting refugee status determination. Housed by National Asylum Seeker Service (NASS) [video_5].

Chip pan fire. Red Road resident of about 30 years and who was raised there as child [video_6].

Stair windows. The concierge comments on condition of windows in the block while doing a routine block check [video_7].