In more bureaucratic contexts the window became an important part of the discourse of empowerment and enfranchisement that went along with the initial stages of highrise mass housing provision. In this image from a Pruitt-Igoe promotional brochure, for example, the hope of a new life for this black family is expressed by way of a photograph of them standing at a highrise window absorbing the view [image_2] .

But just as the window formed a marker of the positive hopes tied to the highrise, so too did it come to be stitched into the story of highrise decline. Social science studies of highrise building performance would often ‘ground truth’ the claims made in favour of highrise living, including the benefit of the highrise window and its associated light and view. For example, Pearl Jephcott’s 1971 study of highrise resident satisfaction in Glasgow [image_3] paused specifically at the window of ‘Mrs ___.’ in order to comment upon careless design. As the sequence of two photographs show, the window does capture a view, but only from an impossible viewing point from within the flat. In contrast, because of the placement of the balcony balustrade, Mrs. ___., cannot enjoy this view when seated [image_4] .

As highrise environments came to be associated with various social pathologies (crime and deviancy among them) the window was often drawn in to the emergent highrise science as an indicator of all that was wrong with highrises. For example, William L. Yancey, in positing a wider thesis on the importance of architectural design in determining quality of life, drew specifically on the example of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project. In one 1971 article, reprinted in Kaplan and Kaplan’s Humanscape [14], he recounts his experience of entering Pruitt-Igoe and along the way specifically mentions windows:

‘On the forth, seventh, and tenth floors, there is an open gallery, or hall, the only level public space within the building, one side of which is lined with broken windows and steel gratings.’ [15].

Yancey goes on to note that ‘[t]he physical danger and deterioration of Pruitt-Igoe is but a reflection of the more pressing human dangers’ [16]. Illustrating this article, is a sequence of uncaptioned images all of which feature Pruitt-Igoe windows. The first of these illustrates the problem of the broken window [image_5]. Although not acknowledged, and the image is sourced to Yancey himself, this image reappears as the frontispiece in Lee Rainwater’s 1972 study of Pruitt-Igoe Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Family Life in a Federal Slum. Yancey discussed many of his ideas with Alvin Gouldner and Lee Rainwater, who were the directors of a large social science study of life in Pruitt-Igoe.