Windows provide a stage through which to observe inner goings on of the buildings that underpin our society and economy as commodities to be exchanged and consumed.¹

Dual speculates on the windowsill as a threshold between two dimensions (the interior and exterior of the home) and its potential to convey suggestions of internal economic circumstance through its continuous gradient towards an external streetscape vocabulary.

West London’s Golborne Road is a high street home to a broad demographic and is economically polarised from each end as it stretches between Notting hill’s affluent Portobello Road and the social housing of Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower. The project centres around three housing typologies present along and around Golborne Road and their subsequent ground floor window and sills documented: a Victorian bay window, a Georgian terrace window, and an example from St Ervans Court social housing (circa 1980). According to the Architect Luigi Caccia Dominuoni, >the arrangement of the individual furnishings and fittings determines the partitioning of the living space and therefore also dictates the placement of doors and windows.²

As such, it is possible to read the windows to determine the coherence between the floorplan and the urban situation. Each of the three windowsills has its own architectural pattern of dimensions, subsequently defining a set of conditions characteristic of each building typology.

By exploring how each of these windowsills are used and personalised by their inhabitants, the project asks, how has the activation of these architectural objects transcended their standardized dimensions into a kind of voyeuristic stage for the passers-by? Furthermore, how do they operate as a portal into a dimensionless space informed by the very socio-economic classes they are subsumed in.