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| Mayor's Suite/City Council Chamber windows, Boston City Hall (1969, Kallmann-McKinnell-Knowles). Photo: Epicgenius. |
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| Boston City Hall (1969, Kallmann-McKinnell-Knowles). Photo by Daderot. |
...and they could indeed see your every move, if someone does happen to be watching you from the privacy of whatever room lurks behind those twin windows, while you transfix your private eyes onto them in fascination with their in-your-face stare at your lowly self. |
| City Council Chamber, Boston City Hall, in 1981. Photo by Bill Lebovich. |
That classic Hall & Oates song from 1981 flashed in my mind as I saw an image of the two watchful windows of the City Council Chamber (left) in Boston's City Hall, which were clearly designed to enable city councilors to keep vigil on the city they're leading, reassure us that they're watching over us like angels, or remind us that "Big Brother is watching you," in George Orwell's words of warning from 1984.  |
| Victorian blast furnace, Shropshire, UK. Photo by David Humphreys. |
That is but one example of the "two eyes" effect in a lot of architecture all over the world, as designers integrated the semblance of faces or ogling eyeballs into their houses or buildings. They were either deliberate attention-getters as sales or leasing pitches for the structures, or simply sources of sunlight that just happen to have facial attributes. The Victorian-era blast furnace on the right was probably not intended to be facially comical, but we can't help seeing its elongated leaded windows as eyes, its central circular vent as a nose, its arched entry as a mouth, its chimney as a raised right arm, and its gabled roof as a peaked hat. |
| Photo courtesy of Build Green New Homes. |
In fact, I was taught to recognize eyes and faces in houses as early as third grade, courtesy of the following poem:
HOUSES
by Aileen Fisher
Houses are faces
(haven't you found?)
with their hats in the air
and their necks in the ground.
Windows are noses,
windows are eyes,
and doors are the mouths
of a suitable size.
And the porch – or the place
where porches begin –
is just like a mustache
shading the chin.
One of greater Boston's most instantly recognizable "faces" is the rounded, oddly detailed front entrance façade of the Harvard Lampoon Castle in Cambridge. Built in 1909 from a composite design of Dutch Gable, Flemish Renaissance, Elizabethan, Jacobethan and English Medieval styles by Edmund March Wheelwright (who embellished it with real 17th-century Delft tiles, Belgian leaded windows and a genuine Elizabethan mantelpiece), this oddball mashup of sometimes incongruous architectural details bespeaks the humor of its interior publication with a comical face, comprising a bowler hat with a hair-standing-on-end crown, porthole eyes with lozenge frames, a cast-iron lantern nose and a lintel-lipped (or mustached) vertical window mouth (or a vertical window nose and an agape front-door mouth, depending on one's point of view), a front-stoop beard, and a cylindrical brick façade suggesting the contours of a ruddy, sunburned or drunkenly flushed human face. The façade seems to have the bug-eyed stare of someone caught off-guard in a comedy sketch, in line with the humorous slant of the stomping grounds for such pioneering humorists as Robert Benchley, Christopher Cerf, Fred Gwynne, B.J. Novak, and Conan O'Brien.  |
| Harvard Lampoon Castle (1909, Edmund March Wheelwright), Cambridge, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Google Maps. |
More to come...
