Editor’s Note: This is the second post in the Dwelling in Place series edited by Nicole Miller. You can read other posts in this series here. Selected posts from this series, including this one, will also be cross-published on Germinate: An Environmental History Review.
One morning in the spring of 1944, Robert Dunbar and his wife Clara were startled by a loud “thud” at their dinette window.1
This was not the first time one of the picture windows in their newly built home had made a worrisome noise. Since they moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the year before, these four-by-four-foot panes of sheet glass had rumbled time and time again, the elusive disturbance heard but unseen.
Robert and Clara “rush[ed] to the point of impact.” To their dismay, they found a hooded warbler lying on the ground, its neck snapped, head askew. In that instant, the “unobstructed view of the yard and much of the woods” that had gifted the middle-aged couple “many a pleasant hour with field glass and telescope watching the bird activities” was smudged by the indelible remains of animal death. Their home had been mortified, their window now a tombstone. Years later, Robert would remark that it was not just “our first known casualty of this kind.” It was, he said ruefully, “the first Hooded Warbler that we had ever seen.”2
From then on, the thud became a recurring sound at 106 Glendale Lane. It resounded through the walls and accompanied the Dunbars’ domestic routines—a “death score,” in Robert’s words, to their everyday life. Whenever they heard the dull, fleshy beat, they stopped what they were doing, whether enjoying a meal together or resting in bed, and searched their backyard for a bird. Sometimes they encountered the animal injured and monitored its vitals, but “all too often,” Mr. Dunbar lamented, “we find the mute evidence lying still beneath our window.” First it was a wood thrush. Then a robin, a myrtle warbler, a Northern flicker, an ovenbird, a dark-eyed junco, and, finally, a second wood thrush. All in all, at least eight birds had flown into their windows in the span of a half-decade, and “perhaps,” Robert realized, “there were other birds which met their death while we were away from home, for on several such occasions, when we returned, we found a smudge and a bit of feathers on one of our picture windows.”3
The neighbors were finding them too: “A friend who resides at 106 Norton Road telephoned a description of a bird that had met its death. Since then, we have received many reports of bird fatality caused by the picture windows of Oak Ridge.”4
An Ornithological History of the Picture Window
When Robert Dunbar published his account of “birds colliding into windows” in the March 1949 issue of The Migrant, he was not recording a new phenomenon.5 In 1808, Alexander Wilson, the so-called “Father of American Ornithology,” witnessed an Eastern screech owl “[strike] itself so forcibly against a window that [he] began to fear that either the glass or the Owl’s skull must give way.”6 Since the early 19th century, ornithologists like Wilson had periodically witnessed birds striking windows, yet for gentleman-naturalists in the United States, these infrequent events were more anecdotal curiosity than they were Kuhnian anomaly.
Consider Thomas Nuttall. Midway through his entry in the Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and Canada on the American Brown Hawk, he recounts the dramatic scene of a juvenile bird who “broke through the glass of the greenhouse at the Cambridge Botanic Garden,” shattered two further partitions, and tore its wings in its entry and attempts to escape.7 Without pause nor further ado, he then slips back into a prosaic list of the “mice, lizards, small birds, and sometimes even squirrels” that this raptor eats, glazing over the spectacle that he had just portrayed.8 By 1931, however, the number of birds flying into windows had grown so great that the Senior Biologist in Charge at the United States Biological Survey felt compelled to register “window fatalities” as a notable cause of avian mortality in the United States.9
In the century between Nuttall’s insouciance and Lincoln’s alarm, technical innovations in plate glass manufacturing had enabled the cheap, rapid production of windowpanes that were not only larger than the human body but also free from bubbles and ripples.10 As designers and developers embraced a commodity once reserved for public buildings (e.g., cathedrals, train stations, & arcades) or luxury residences and greenhouses, they vitrified America. So exalted was glass in this new International Style that Le Corbusier declared it “the fundamental material of modern architecture” in 1935.11
While architects were dazzled by the transparency of glass, ornithologists began documenting its unintended effects. “Two broad-tailed hummingbirds were killed by flying against a plate glass shop window” beheld C.A. Black from Kearney, Nebraska.12 G. Willett, meanwhile, discovered that the russet-backed thrushes of Los Angeles had a proclivity for “killing or maiming themselves against glass windows or doors.”13 Some blamed the “glare of electric light”14 while others faulted individual birds for “defective eyesight”15 or entire species for “habits of tunnel flight.”16 According to Dunbar, however, the reason for their unprecedented deaths was not biological; it was architectural: “Birds, however keen-eyed they may be, apparently can not see the crystal clear glass of our modern picture windows.”17 For him, this style of fenestration–the picture window–was a matter of concern.18
For the Dunbars and their neighbors, the picture window would have seemed an attractive novelty. It was a formal experiment in American housing that the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) had begun implementing in Oak Ridge, one of the three “secret communities,” along with Los Alamos and Hanover, where the US government developed nuclear weapons under the ambit of the Manhattan Project. To accommodate a population that swelled to 75,000 between 1942 and 1945, SOM designed a master plan that centered on a network of prefabricated, vinyl-paneled ranch houses, each with a picture window that overlooked a grass lawn. By appearing to dissolve the building envelope and open up inside to outside, these glass features inflated the imagined volume of what were modest dwelling quarters—a draw, they intended, for top scientific talent.19
Robert and Clara were among the first to occupy these homes. An engineer employed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, Robert was, in fact, responsible for the location of Oak Ridge. In 1942, he was approached by Army Colonel James C. Marshall, then the head of the Manhattan Project, and tasked with identifying a suitable site for their uranium enrichment program.20 Robert proposed the Clinch River Valley, a 7-mile stretch of meandering countryside with water access. One year later, “all the farms within the 56,000 acres…had been abandoned,” their occupants dispossessed of their lands and dispatched via eminent domain.21 Subsequently assigned to the Y-12 electro-magnetic separation plant, Robert and Clara selected the location of their home and moved in while the neighborhood was still under construction.
This mutation in building form proved fatal for the migratory birds who had long traversed the region to cross the Mississippi and Atlantic Flyways. Deceived by the uncanny images of trees and sky that reflected off these windows, they were drawn, disoriented, into the phantasmagoric ecology of glass.22 As their bodies piled up around his home, Robert issued a warning. “From within most people like the broad expanse of floor to ceiling glass in the living-dining rooms of this type of home, yet, for all the comfort and convenience we humans may derive from such ultra modern design, the spacious unbroken walls of clear glass…are sure to increase an already too great man-made hazard to bird life.”23
Robert’s words, in hindsight, were all too true. After the war, veterans returned from overseas, formed families, and started households that spawned a boom in building construction and a doubling of the national stock, from 37.3 million units in 1940 to 68.7 million as of 1970.24 Prevalent in many of these single-family, suburban residences was the picture window—a legacy of the Oak Ridge model.25 Collisions, as Robert predicted, continued to soar to a peak, ornithologists estimate today, of approximately one billion per year, the violence of the Manhattan Project begetting troubles of a different feather.26
Reading Heidegger against the Pane
In 1951, two years after Robert Dunbar exposed the hazards of the picture window, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger addressed the problem of “today’s houses” at the Man and Space colloquium in Darmstadt. In a lecture on reconstruction that was published in 1954 as “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” he admitted to the architects and urban planners who were there that the “residential buildings” they had hastily erected in the rubble of World War 2—mass-produced apartments not unlike the residences SOM had built—“do indeed provide shelter.” Such buildings “may even be well-planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, [and] open to air, light, and sun,” added Heidegger. “But,” he asked probingly, “do the houses themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?”27
For Heidegger, dwelling was the foundation of human existence, “the manner in which mortals are on the earth.”28 Wise to the word’s Gothic roots as an act of preserving, he told his audience that dwelling consists of bringing the sky, the earth (“the plant and animal”), the divinities, and other mortals “under our care.”29 It is, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold later concurred in “Building, Dwelling, Living,” an “active engagement” with “beings of manifold kinds.”30 To dwell, from this perspective, is to live among others, to be at home in a world that is more-than-human.31 “Genuine buildings,” Heidegger believed, “should give form to dwelling.”32 Exemplary for him in this regard were the vernacular farmhouses found in the Black Forest. From their placement on the “wind-sheltered mountain slope […], among the meadows close to the spring,” to their “wide overhanging shingle roof,” which protected against snow and storms, these traditional dwellings “enter[ed] in simple oneness” with the landscape and its elements.33 Hence Heidegger’s design heuristic: “Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build.”34
Much has already been said of the “dark side of the domus,” of the nationalist connotations of Heidegger’s romantic longing for quaint, countryside dwellings and their connections to place, soil, and homeland.35 Yet perhaps we might read his diatribe against modern architecture against the grain. Perhaps, with Robert Dunbar as our guide, we might read him against the pane, less as a conservative reaction to the urban Other and more as an ecological plea for “forms of habitation that produce the conditions for mutual concern and ethical possibility.”36
If “the task of architecture is to make visible how the world touches us,” as architect Juhani Palasmaa has decreed, then the great irony of modernism and its infatuation with transparency is the picture window, and glass more broadly construed, effected the disappearance of that very world; it crystallized the erasure of avian wildlife.37 For the Dunbars, to dwell was not to live beside other kinds of beings. To dwell, on the contrary, was to kill, the deaths of birds engraved onto the surfaces of their home, onto the “topography of [their] intimate Being.”38 Yet collisions for the Dunbars were also calls to become responsive once again to the world outside. Witnessing the harms that their home had caused, tending to the birds it had injured, and sounding the alarm about the threat that glass posed, they rejected the fragile distinctions between inside and outside that the window, despite its pretensions to openness, had only reinforced.
As we continue to build today in the wake of glass, we would do well to heed the thud as the Dunbars did, to respond to its call to dwell again.
Notes
1 Robert Dunbar. 1949. “Birds Colliding into Windows.” The Migrant 20(1): 12-15, 13.
2 Ibid, 13.
3 Ibid, 13.
4 Ibid, 13.
5 Ibid.
6 Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology: or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, Volume 2 (Whittaker, Treacher, & Arnot, 1832), 179-180.
7 Thomas Nuttall. 1832. A Manual of the Ornithology of the United States and of Canada. Hillard and Brown. 88.
8 Ibid, 88.
9 Frederick C. Lincoln, “Some Causes of Mortality among Birds,” The Auk 48, no. 4 (1931): 538-546.
10 See Stephen Eskilson, The Age of Glass: A Cultural History of Glass in Modern and Contemporary Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) and Daniel Jütte, Transparency: The Material History of an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.
11 Le Corbusier, “Glass, the Fundamental Material of Modern Architecture,” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 19, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2012), 282-308.
12 C.A. Black, “Some Bird Notes from Central and Western Nebraska,” The Wilson Bulletin 34, no. 1 (March 1922), 43.
13 G. Willett. 1945. “Does the Russet Backed Thrush Have Defective Eyesight?” The Condor 47(5): 12.
14 Black, “Some Bird Notes from Central and Western Nebraska,” 44.
15 Willett, “Does the Russet Backed Thrush Have Defective Eyesight?”, 12.
16 Roland Case Ross. 1946. “People in Glass Houses Should Draw Their Shades.” The Condor 48(3): 12.
17 Dunbar, “Birds Colliding into Windows,” 13.
18 On “matters of concern,” see Bruno Latour. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2: 225-248.
19 Jung, Hyun Tae. 2011. “Organization and Abstraction: The Architecture of Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill from 1936 to 1956.” Ph.D. dissertation submitted at Columbia University.
20 Ray Smith, “Robert J. Dunbar.” The Oak Ridger.
21 Robert Dunbar. 1947. “The House Sparrow at Oak Ridge.” The Migrant 18(3): 38-40, 39.
22 On the notion of “disorientation” as it relates to the home, see Heather Anne Swason. 2018. “Domestication Gone Wild: Pacific Salmon and the Disruption of the Domus.” In Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of Multispecies Relations, ed. Heather Anne Swanson, Marianne Elisabeth Lien, and Gro Ween, 141-158. Duke University Press.
23 Dunbar, “Birds Colliding into Windows,” 12-13.
24 U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1971. 1970 Census of Population and Housing. U.S. Government Printing Office.
25 Jung, “Organization and Abstraction.”
26 Scott Loss, Tom Will, Sara Loss, and Peter Marra. 2014. “Bird-Building Collisions in the United States: Estimates of Annual Mortality and Species Vulnerability.” The Condor 116(1): 8-23.
27 Martin Heidegger. 1971[1954]. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Harper Perennial. 141-160, 144.
28 Ibid, 146.
29 bid, 149.
30 Tim Ingold. 2000. “Building Dwelling Living.” In The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill. Taylor & Francis Group. 5.
31 For a Heideggerian take on being “at home,” see Michael Jackson. 1995. At Home in the World. Duke University Press.
32 Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” 156.
33 Ibid, 158.
34 Ibid, 157.
35 Neil Leach. 1998. “The Dark Side of the Domus.” The Journal of Architecture 3(1): 31-42.
36 Jason Danely. 2019. “The Limits of Dwelling and the Unwitnessed Death.” Cultural
Anthropology 34(2): 213-239, 214. For an example of reading Heidegger’s concept of dwelling ecologically, see Michael Degani. 2024. “Dwelling in the Climate Emergency.” Guest post for the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene.
37 Juhani Palasmaa. 1996. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. John Wiley & Sons. 17.
38 Gaston Bachelard. 1957. The Poetics of Space. Penguin. 36.
Richard Fadok
Latest posts by Richard Fadok (see all)
- Building, Dwelling, Killing - October 22, 2026