For Matteo Pericoli, architect and artist, the act of looking out a window often provides a "reset button" of sorts, a moment of mindless distraction. But in 2004, as he prepared to move out of his New York City apartment, Pericoli (London Unfurled) had a sudden urge to capture the view from his window, a scene he had looked at daily for seven years without always seeing it.
Drawing the landscape--window frame and all--revealed to Pericoli how deeply his view of Manhattan had affected his perception of the city and his time there. That experience inspired his Windows on the World project, which ran first in the New York Times and later in the Paris Review. Working from photographs, Pericoli created detailed pen-and-ink illustrations of windows belonging to writers, which were published alongside brief essays from the writers themselves. This volume collects 35 previously published window-essay pairings, along with 15 new illustrations and their accompanying texts.
From city rooftops or lush parks to suburban vacant lots and a few remote islands, the views are varied and stunning, encompassing locations on six continents. The written meditations on each window provide insight into the close, often complex relationships between writers and the places where they write.
"Each window represents a point of view, and a point of origin," notes Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, in his preface. Pericoli's keen-eyed drawings provide a new and graceful perspective on the quotidian, prompting readers to observe their own everyday worlds more closely. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams