THE WORLD'S WORST WINDOW

If you set out to create the worst window you could, you might go about it like this:

First, you’d design it to oppose the pull of gravity, and therefore require a Rube Goldberg contraption of weights and ropes, cables, or springs just to keep it from falling shut. You’d also make sure you could never open more than half of it at a time. Of course you’d arrange the sash so that your view would be blocked by a big dividing bar. And naturally, you’d also make it hard to maintain and a headache to paint. Lastly, you’d  conceal the operating mechanism to make it fiendishly difficult to repair. 

Is this the world's worst window?

If you managed to fulfill every one of these none-too-admirable goals, the result of your design would probably be a double hung window.

So much for my hypothetical bad-design contest. In reality, the origin of the double hung window is British. Its invention is often attributed to Robert Hooke (1635-1703), surveyor to the City of London and chief assistant to the renowned architect Sir Christopher Wren. Hooke assisted Wren during the rebuilding of London following the Great Fire of 1666. 

Since this catastrophe left most of the city in ashes, it was probably a perfect opportunity to pioneer a new type of window. And indeed, the oldest surviving double hungs date back to English manor houses of the 1670s, such as London’s Ham House. As old as these windows are, their appearance hardly differs from modern examples--they feature the same six-over-six muntin arrangement that’s still popular today.

Double-hung windows were ubiquitous in
Georgian and Federal architecture.

Naturally, when the English came to the New World, double hung windows came with them. Although very early American Colonial houses used simple-to-build casement windows, the homes of well-to-do colonists began boasting double hungs as soon as they became available. They remained an architectural staple throughout the Georgian and  Federal periods (the White House, you may recall, has double hung windows). 

The emphatically vertical architecture of the later Gothic Revival and Victorian eras--which demanded windows with tall, skinny proportions--meant their popularity only increased.

It was the multitudes of these strangely pinched-looking double hung windows that the young Frank Lloyd Wright noted with dismay on his walks through Chicago, and which he later dubbed “guillotine windows” in his prose. 

Victorian-era houses, too, are known for their
double-hung windows—this example
even features curved ones in the corner tower.
(Charles Copeland Morse house,
Santa Clara, California, 1892)

The Romantic Revival home styles of the early 20th century briefly challenged the primacy of the double hung, since their architects preferred the more Medieval-looking casement window. But by the time large-scale home building resumed after World War II, double hung windows made a huge comeback in mass produced, Colonial-Revival-esque tracts such as Levittown. Only the widespread introduction of horizontal sliding aluminum windows during the 1950s finally made a substantial (and lasting) dent in their popularity.

In fairness, there’s no doubt that today’s double hung windows, while still looking pretty much like their ancestors of the 1670s, have been greatly improved. For one, they use spring counterweights instead of that quasi-comical arrangement of ropes, pulleys and counterweights. They’re also far more energy efficient and easier to maintain than their predecessors. 

Still and all, they don’t make a whole lot of sense as windows. Robert Hooke was a brilliant man, but the double-hung window is one thing he got wrong.