Toute l’histoire de l’architecture tourne autour de la fenêtre pour donner de la lumière.

Le Corbusier / Pierre Jeanneret. Cinq points vers une nouvelle architecture (1926)

Windows constitute a more important element in modern architecture than they have in any architecture since that of the Gothic cathedrals. They are the most conspicuous features of modern exterior design. Their handling is therefore an aesthetic problem of the greatest importance. (…) Light simple frames, preferably of durable non-corroding metal in standardized units, are to be desired as much aesthetically as practically. (…) the general development in this direction is undeniable and one of happy augury for the contemporary style.

Henry-Russel Hitchcock / Philip Johnson. The International Style: Architecture since 1922. New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company. 1996, p. 61 (originally published 1932)

Here is the value of a wide sliding door opening pleasantly onto a garden. It cannot be measured by counting how often and how steadily the door is used or how many hours it stays open. The decisive thing may be a first deep breath of liberation when one is in the almost ritual act of opening it before breakfast or on the first warm and scented spring day. The memories of one’s youth and of the landscape in which it was spent seem composed, to a considerable degree, of this sort of vital recollection. There are in each life certain scattered quanta of experience that may have been of small number or dimension statistically but were so intense as to provide impacts, forever essential.

Richard Neutra. Survival Through Design, New York: Oxford University Press. 1954, p. 229.