Fifty of the world's greatest writers share their views with artist Matteo Pericoli, expanding our own views on place, creativity, and the meaning of home.
All of us, at some point in our daily lives, find ourselves looking out the window. We pause in our work, tune out of a conversation, and turn toward the outside. Our eyes simply gaze, without seeing, at a landscape whose familiarity becomes the customary ground for distraction: the usual rooftops, the familiar trees, a distant crane. The way of life for most of us in the twenty-first century means that we spend most of our time indoors, in an urban environment, and our awareness of the outside world comes via, and thanks to, a framed glass hole in the wall.
In Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views, architect and artist Matteo Pericoli explores this theme alongside fifty writers from across the globe. By pairing drawings of window views with texts that reveal what the drawings cannot, Windows on the World offers a perceptual journey through the world as seen through the windows of prominent writers: Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, Daniel Kehlmann in Berlin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Lagos, John Jeremiah Sullivan in Wilmington, North Carolina, Nadine Gordimer in Johannesburg. Taken together, the views—geography and perspective, location and voice—resonate with and play off each other. As we discover intimate views from cities around the world, a new kind of map begins to take shape.
