Photographs of windows from the Carol M. Highsmith archives at the Library of Congress. These (including my great favorite, above) are here arranged in a rough chronology of oldest to newest, top to bottom, extending from about 1840 to about 1940. If somebody asked me to write an essay about styles of vernacular architecture in the northern portion of the western hemisphere, this would be the hundred-year time-span that would interest me – the long & unselfconscious era just before full-scale mechanized modernism took over, with its sad vocabulary of interchangeable parts.
