Modern living – aquarium or cave?

I was pleased about the great response to my column about apartments with windowless bathrooms. The readers' comments were pleasantly factual. Some provided suggestions for further columns. The same for today's topic: Sense and nonsense of floor-to-ceiling windows.

As with open kitchens and other fads of modernity, the principle of the great Mies van der Rohe, who once said to the pope of functionalism, Hugo Häring, also applies here: “Make the rooms jroß jenug, Hugo, you can do everything in them.” What So what is good in a villa, an upper-class apartment or a factory floor does not necessarily have to be good in a small apartment or an office with staff cages.

To start with the last one: walk past a glass facade in the evening when the light is switched on inside and the forbidding black front suddenly becomes a transparent membrane. You see the backs of desks and screens, tangled cables and wastebaskets.

If the rooms were "jroß jenug", the windows could be kept free; but except in the executive suites, people are stingy with space. Sooner or later the desks move to the window, where the light is better, and the radiant glass palace becomes unsightly evidence of the second law of thermodynamics, according to which disorder increases in closed systems.

Frederick the Great made the garden of his palace Sanssouci an extension of the interior with floor-to-ceiling windows. In front of it rulers sat on a pedestal and looked not in, but across the garden. Although the Potsdam court society froze in winter because the rooms did not have a basement, Sanssouci was and is very beautiful in summer.

The Bauhaus took up the idea again. I too have a glass wall on the ground floor of my terraced house, and thanks to insulating glass, a basement and underfloor heating, I can drink tea inside and take part in the life of the snowy garden. Wonderful.

But you also sit in a display case, have to keep things tidy, often clean the panorama window, which quickly gets dusty, and make do with less furniture than if you could slide a sideboard, table or sofa under a window that is attached at hip height. I have such windows in my study and guest room as well as in the bathrooms. Floor-to-ceiling windows would be a nuisance there.

Walk through a modern housing estate: you will see many such annoyances, which are only due to the architect's will to style, not a functionalist point of view. Residents half-cover the floor-to-ceiling windows with blinds or paper to protect their privacy from prying eyes. It's probably enough that you can watch them at work.

In short: not everything that is chic is also chic. We all have too much stuff and not enough space. Bosses and rich people can work and live in glass cases; they have space and staff to clean up for them. The rest of us need a little cave too. It doesn't have to be a windowless bathroom.