[What] has been of great interest to me always is the idea of the window. There’s something very moving about a window. When I grew up in London, I used to live far away from where I worked, so I used to have to travel the whole width of the city by train. London is different from other cities, though parts of San Francisco are similar, but there you are going through a city of windows, perhaps more than in any other city. The windows of London are very important. Every house, and they are mostly Victorian houses, has beautiful, big windows and when you are going by you see these wonderful little vignettes of people leading their lives. When the lights come on in the evening, and people don’t draw the curtains, it’s so beautiful to go by in a train. Train lines tend to pass by the backs of houses, so people have their guards down, and you see them in all kinds of situations: some of them are stark naked! A window is a promise, like a doorway. A facade is not totally relentless because of the window and the door. That’s what humanises the wall.

Sean Scully, interview with Constance Lewallen, View, vol. 5, no. 4, Fall 1988, pp. 1–22 (p. 10).