anagramofbrat | A muse about windows and panoramic views

I find walls of windows soothing.

I just made this connection as I was thinking about where in the BCEC I would retreat when I got overstimulated or needed downtime (or just reliable internet). It turns out the places I would go to the most were the lobbies on the second floor, two on either side of the convention center. These were these spaces off the main corridors that opened out into this space entirely walled in windows overlooking South Boston, the waterfront, and in the distance on some sides, downtown. They had small leather chairs arranged around tables, presumably for businessmen to have coffee. The ones in the back tended to be pretty sparsely populated, being pretty far away from quite literally everything else at the con, but they were quiet and comfortable, and the view outside was interesting, panoramic, and invited the eye to roam and the consciousness to relax.

I remember one similarly contructed place that I used to retreat to a lot as a kid, which was my school's library. UNIS's main campus building is this crazy trapezoidal shape with one end of the building coming to an extremely acute point. On the third floor in that corner was the reading area of the library, and if you pulled a chair as far into that corner as you could go and still have enough space for your legs, you were treated to a rather impressive uniterrupted expanse of the East river bordered on either side by two of the bridges that cross it (the Queensboro and the Williamsburg) and between that, a swath of Queens and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. This was never a boring view, as there was always interesting traffic on the river itself - barges, yachts, tourist cruises, police boats, giant chunks of ice in the winter, and eerily one warm day, a giant bloom* of jellyfish silently undulating its way past. It was also a great place to watch inclement weather pass over - thunderstorms being the most impressive. Lightning likes to bounce around skyscrapers. No matter what all was going on, It was very easy to look up from a book and get pulled into the view outside. I got the same sense from the BCEC.

I like windows. I think it is a combination of that library being my safe space as a kid, growing up in a place where things like what you saw out of any given window was often taken into account by the architects of whatever building you're in, and also rebelling against my mother's agoraphobic tendency to shutter, blind and drape all windows in an already relatively dark house to the point where we tend to use artificial light in there 24/7.

I don't know, it was an interesting thing to think of. Strange what binds a person to a physical space...

* yes, I had to look that up. Collective nouns, how I am amused by you.