There is no worse fate than being captive in a windowless room. If the room is small, all the worse. It must be said within our core being, windows promise escape.
We don’t make buildings without windows, other than for specific reasons. Primarily, buildings that need to be secured, because windows don’t only promise escape, they offer entrance. Buildings like power stations, bank vaults, military installations and of course, prisons. Whose windows, if they exist, offer only respite from endless mono colour interior, but rarely escape.
Windows are doors, as doors are windows.
Windows, in most buildings, invite the outside in, especially air. “Open the window and let’s freshen this place up,” is a common refrain. In the Spring people don’t only open the windows to let in fresh air, they clean the windows, to let the new light of Spring in unabated, as unfiltered as possible, that the life of the house be renewed and as transparent as possible.
Windows don’t contain the home. They not only open, windows make the home one with the outside. Windows bring in the outdoors. With the right windows and architecture, it can be difficult to say where the division is between outside and inside of the house.
Apartment building, skyscraper windows, of course, do not meet any of these criteria; they are no longer windows when hermetic. They are transparent walls, nothing more. I have to admit, I always feel a sense of claustrophobia when in any room where the windows do not open. They’re a false promise.

Pinturicchio, Three Frescoes from Palazzo del Magnifico, Siena, about 1509, fresco, transferred to canvas, 125.5 × 152 cm (49.409 x 59.843 inches)

Windows feature prominently in art. Vermeer is the first artist I can think of who uses windows as an integral part of his compositions, but I’m sure there are others earlier. I don’t pretend to be a deep authority in art history, I just like art. Whether Vermeer (mid 17^th C), or Pinturicchio (early 16^th C), or others, artists include windows to introduce new effects of light and colour into the composition, to display greater technique and virtuosity; windows can be a new picture within the larger picture, what is seen without introduced to what is within.
Such pictures within windows can be commonplace or fantastic, they can allow new characters to enter, or to be seen from afar. The paintings of Chagall abound with such examples. Ellsworth Kelly creates paintings of windows expressed as simple lines in ratio to the frame of the painting, such that the representation of the window becomes an essay on division of space within the painting. Kelly’s simple window makes us meditate on the meaning of the window, its representation, its method of representation, the effect of its representation within both art and our living.
Windows frame what is within them as art. Windows introduce the new to within. Windows allow us to look forward into the future. Windows invite us to escape the within both abstractly, and if necessary, physically. Windows not only let us see out; they allow us to see that which we never find inside without them — constant change in light and shadow, and what is to be seen outside, whether it’s something we’re expecting and waiting for, or anything outside of our control — windows replace interior predictability by introducing the constant change of the outside world.