Like medicine—in fact, more manifestly so—architecture is both an art and a science. Its art, often described synesthetically as frozen music, is apparent to everyone who stops to look. Its science is obvious to anyone who pauses to think. Like medicine, architecture also carries, albeit less conspicuously, a humanistic component. It responds to the emotional needs and the longings of the human spirit. In this, it indirectly shares with medicine a concern with human health needs.
One such concern is windows, or rather windowlessness, in public buildings. The problem is not a lack of ventilation or illumination—these are taken care of by air conditioning and artificial lighting—but the absence of an outlet for human visual curiosity. Wilson1 described the effect of this sensory deprivation on health in 1972. He compared the incidence of postoperative delirium in two neighboring intensive care units that resembled each other in all respects save