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BAY_WINDOW

                                                       April 19, 2014

For those of you who have never lived in a Victorian
building, the way that those cute "Bay Windows" look
from the interior is like this:

  [ref]


Imagine stepping out into the "bay",
and looking in all directions:

              _______
             /       \
            /    x    \
       ____/           \____


With bay windows, you can look up and down the
street easily-- and that's almost always where
people want to look.  The preferred line of
sight ends up being nearly perpendicular to the
glass.

With ordinary flat windows, it's often
physically impossible to look where you
want to look: You press your nose against
the glass, peering through it sideways at
an angle so oblique that the glass
effectively becomes a mirror.


   The point that I'm getting at is
   that bay windows don't just
   look cool-- though they do look
   cool-- they actually work well.

   So, there are multiple different advantages
   to this particular traditional design pattern.

   Does that seem like an obvious, easy-to-understand
   point?  Then you must not be an architect.


      I've seen architects do things like put
      banks of bay windows on one part of a
      project, and just to mix things up, on
      another part of it they put *inverted*
      bay windows: recessed windows where you
      can't look left or right at all, because
      they're sunk into a slot..                     Shades of the old
                                                     World Trade Center.
      Articulated fronts are good, right?
      zig in here, zag out there, at least                 FALLEN_TOWERS
      it's not a boring blank wall!

      Yes, that's all very cool, but wouildn't
      it be even cooler if the articulated front
      was something *besides* a decorative frill?



Consider this new scheme for retrofitting The
Mission Theater, an existing building in SF, an
old long-defunct theater which will become
primarilly housing, though as I understand it,
it will include at least a small performance
space:

   [ref]

                                I found this illustrating this article:
                                [ref]

   Clearly, the architect was
   thinking something like
   this "I'll do a *clever
   variation* on bay windows:
   instead of a wavy pattern
   in the horizontal                 Though just to be fair,
   direction, I'll do it in          compare this to the present
   the *vertical* direction          look of the Mission Theater:
   Genius!".
                                     [ref]
                                     [ref]


                                                    (I used to like the old,
                                                    now closed, "Giant Value"
          The worst crimes of all,                  store, which had a nice
          though were committed in                  display of long-handled
          the 50s and 60s:                          clippers right next to
                                                    the bike cable locks.
          SF apparently had zoning                  They kept both sides of
          regs that allowed some                    the community supplied.)
          sidewalk overhang so that
          bay windows would be legal.

          The housing developers took this as
          an invitation to tack an extra two
          feet of floor space on the sides of          Compare to the 90s:
          apartments, doing over-hanging boxes         a rule change to
          that typically didn't even have any          legalize artist live/
          windows on the sides.                        work spaces in old
                                                       industrial buildings
                                                       was taken as permission
                                                       to build piles of
                                                       crappy, cheaply-built
                                                       condos, but with *high
             This is an industry                       ceilings*.
             completely without any
             pride or ethics-- I'd
             say they would steal
             sheep, but that's an
             insult to sheep thiefs.





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