WINDOWS OF TRANSITION

Even when you are in a hurry you manage to catch some unusual elements on windows or behind them. At a closer look, vivid details can tell you about the owners of the windows and some of the details can be addressed to you — the passerby. For example, Christmas decorations impress when you see them in the midst of summer carefully laid out between the window frames above some material that represents snow. Besides Christmas-tree decorations and tinsel, you can see paper snowflakes, moss, and dried berries, pine cones, plastic toys and bunches of mountain ash berries. Knowing traditional Irkutsk practices of preparing the home for a change of seasons you understand that utility precedes ornamentation.

Before the cold weather season wooden house residents install second, inner frames to their windows. Newly formed cracks are filled with cotton wool and glued over with pieces of paper or fabric (you can make the glue for this yourself — you just need to add cold water to flour, slowly pour in boiling water and then cool it down). The space between the frames is insulated with cotton wool and decorated. In spring the inner frames are taken out, cleaned and put in the storeroom. The process is labor-intensive and perhaps that is why double frames with Christmas ornaments can be seen more and more frequently in summer too. Usually it is temporary residents who put aside labor-intensive practices (in recent years flats in wooden houses are being rented by families of migrant workers from warm countries). No one changes the frames in neglected houses either.

Shutters protect wooden houses from outside threats — wind, snow-storms, thieves and robbers. Walking along streets with continuous wooden houses, you can observe daily morning and evening procedures: no matter the time of year, people living on the first floor go outside twice a day. In the morning to open the shutters, fixing them to the façades by hooks. In the evening, to close the shutters, pressing them inwards with a metal bar. This ritual, unknown to the inhabitants of high-rise buildings, sets the pace of the daily life of those who live on the first floor of "wooden blocks".

In the case of the long absence of flat owners there are two main practices: shutters are held shut by a special metal device that is fixed on the inside and doesn’t let shutters be opened from outside — this is called to close with a "bolt" or a "chikuschka". The technical name of this metal rod is "hinge pivot", but it seems that no one who uses it knows this name. The second way is to ask neighbors to open and close the shutters so people outside think that the house is not empty. It is safe to say that in this case the symbolic function of shutters is being practiced: they act like a sign of security.

In the wild nineties people started to protect the windows with grills. In windows where there are double frames, grills (if they are present) are fixed between the frames. In windows with double-glass panes the grills are almost always located on the inside (unlike the grills of the first floor of high-rise buildings).

Electrically controlled metal shutters are used for protection in the offices that appeared in the "wooden blocks" in the center. Shutters became optional as additional heat and sound insulation (a windscreen) after the wide-scale installation of double-glass unit windows.

Walking after dark along the former Soldatsky Streets (Lapina, Gryaznova, Kievskaya, Khmelnitsky), you can find out that the number of windows closed with shutters almost equals the number of those that are not protected by shutters. In some houses on the same streets the windows are closed with shutters even during the day. It means that the space waits for a new owner or tenant or that the destiny of the house is decided in some other way. Shutters become less and less useful functionally and it seems that even in inhabited houses they will soon remain just as an architectural element.

In wooden houses the windows of the first floor are often located at the level of human height, and the floor there can be lower than the pavement outside: a "cultural layer" built up over a century and sinking of the building foundations have made rooms highly exposed to outside examination. A glance (even flashed in passing) involuntary catches interior details that the residents hardly wanted to show. That is why the rules of courtesy dictate that passersby have a quick, ideally imperceptible glance at someone else’s home.

When you observe or even take pictures of someone else’s windows as part of your "work", discomfort becomes conscious and tangible. A person taking a peep into a stranger’s life is in the situation of visual dominance. Naturally the discomfort is also felt by the person whose life has suddenly become an object of interest of people who he or she doesn’t even know.

The residents of "wooden blocks" usually don’t like it when somebody takes pictures of their windows. On directing a camera lens at windowsills we often encountered the unwelcoming reaction of the owners who suddenly appeared behind the window or even at the door. The indignation transformed into more or less lively conversation and even fostering (sometimes in the form of specialist consultation), if we introduced ourselves as tourists or historians interested in the house itself or if we just talked about an interest in an exotic plant on the windowsill.

Such a change in response is evident proof that the residents feel the border between the house and the street both as a boundary of their private space and as a public space. When the attention of the street crosses that boundary there arises a feeling of a threat of invasion (even if it is of only a visual one), but an active interest in "wooden Irkutsk" is accepted as a norm at least in the town center.

The border is pretty vulnerable and the owners strengthen it with thick curtains, several layers of net curtains, not so often with the help of blinds. Here is an example of "work" with that border from a young woman living on the first floor and complaining that when she turns on the light, the room is seen from the outside all the way through, up to "the opposite wall":

Some new owners of "wooden blocks" psychologically try to adapt to the conditionality of the border:

In that phrase you can see that the border between private and public means more to this woman than she would like it to. And this is the testimonial of a person who grew up in a wooden house and experiences acutely the conditionality of the borders (that we are talking about) as an unavoidable part of life in "wooden blocks":

Besides protecting from outside examination, curtains on windows can be of other service to the owners: they allow one to secretly follow what is happening outside. A window becomes a filter. Semi-translucent net curtains that are probably on most windows in Irkutsk serve best for this. Guests knock on the window so the owners know for whom they are about to open the door. Through the windows they help strangers to find a house they are looking for. Through the windows they sort things out with the drivers of buses and "marshrutkas" (minibuses) that park for "lunch" in front of their windows. In other cases owners avoid direct visual contact, only children, studying the street from the windowsill, play visual games with passersby. In houses where there are no grills children use windows to get out of or into the house.

Wooden houses of Irkutsk after the great fire, that is the ones that were built at the end of the 19^th — beginning of the 20^th century, usually have high windows. Light in the house and architectural "hipness" were clearly more important than the wood consumption. And esthetics was a part of a pragmatic consideration: the attractiveness of a house had a commercial value no matter what function it served. Now pragmatics is in conflict with esthetics. As a commentator on one of Irkutsk websites noted: "this old wooden house looks like a mammoth with a set of false teeth of double-glass windows".

Now double glass panes are in the majority of houses. First of all they are in the houses that look like well-preserved ones. Quite often it offends the eye being in discord with shutters and casings. Though new windows were not a caprice but a practical necessity for those who was setting up a flat or an office in "wooden blocks":

Windows with outside metal blinds seem to be out of place to the same extent as double-glass windows. It is likely that some time should pass before pragmatics and esthetics will fit in together.

Observations of the life of Irkutsk’s first floor windows that began in the summer and were finished in winter proved to us that the windows play various roles (display, protection, border, space for decoration, check point), and, for our work, always have a key function — they are mediators in the communication between the street and the house residents. Usually windows "act" in the interests of their owners but sometimes they become independent subjects of communication by telling more than their owners would like them to.

Being participants in social communication, windows also reflect the changes that happen in the world of people. One example is the fundamental change in the modern dweller’s attitude to time or, to be exact, the gradual fading of traditional cycles and seasons of life. It can be seen in the example of the spaces between window frames: it is quite rare now that there are any changes here from June to December. This tradition has started to disappear because of the speeding up (frequent moving, lack of time for labor-intensive practices) and complexity (individual schedules, migration rates, etc.) of time.

Is there a change in the other practices too? Yes, there is. But in the process of observation it became clear that to follow up and analyze that process is much harder than we thought before. Possibly our attempts were premature: former practices are gone or disappearing, but new ones haven’t become perceptible trends yet. The changes are connected with the change in the owners that means the function of the houses changes too. The circle of those who live now in 'wooden blocks' in the town’s center is socially patchy, the owners of non-residential property often change, also changing the function of the place. The modern group that would define new functions and rules of window usage seems to be at the stage of taking shape.