"The Loneliest Job", an unposed 1961 photo of JFK in the Oval Office by George Tames (The New York Times) shows how a window can express individual presence and uniqueness of outlook. At a traditional domestic scale, even an empty window invokes human presence as surely as a Van Gogh painting of an empty chair or pair of shoes. If the eyes are the window of the soul, windows are the eyes of the building.

A. Paul Weber's 1953 drawing, "The Rumor," captures the psychic unease that results when windows are multiplied beyond the capacity for individual identification. Rather than expressing identity, windows in such huge and regimented numbers convey an oppressive anonymity and conformity.

A detail of Weber's drawing suggests a short leap from the grid-bound anonymity of urban architecture to a complete loss of identity. The many eyes of rumor's personification link it to the building and its countless windows. Residents have been prepared for disappearance into the consensus of rumor by their lock-step environment.

In Michael Wolf's 2007 Hong Kong photo, "Architecture of Density #43," windows annihilate any sense of the individual.

Ralph Walker's sketch for the Barclay-Vesey Building downplays his tower's windows while showing those of neighboring buildings. Walker's brisk drawing style suggests impulsive conception as well as the dynamic massing and upward thrust that are the design's principal aims. The sculptural success of a building often depends on how well a simple sketch or model survives translation into a full-scale realization that must satisfy countless practical needs. The windows Walker tellingly omitted from his sketch simply weren't part of his formative vision. The strategy of camouflaging windows helps keep a large building close to the generative vitality and easily grasped image of its mind's-eye origin, while avoiding the depersonalizing effect of huge fields of windows. Built in a bulkier form than Walker sketched, and completed in 1923, the Barclay-Vesey Building is considered the first executed Art Deco skyscraper. It stands at 140 West Street and was badly damaged on 9/11, but has since been restored.

Raymond Hood's clay study-model of the Daily News Building of 1929-30 explores the tower's massing. Hood's desire to retain the abstract simplicity of this tiny sculpture can be seen in the executed building's flat, bare façade and its concealment of windows within scaleless vertical strips. One recent school of windowflage similarly seeks to shrink and unitize large buildings, but by superimposing large-scale grids or exterior skeletons over their smaller window-grids.

Fox & Fowle Architects' tower, 101 Avenue of the Americas, was completed in 1992. Employing a common strategy of the 1980s, the design places a multistory "super-grid," here in dark brick, over the window pattern. This reduces the perceived scale of the building and camouflages what would otherwise be a numbing grid of smaller punched openings. The super-grid anticipates today's exterior skeletons which similarly subdivide façades into larger segments than the window grid, although with a structural rationale and diagonal lines.

The brown apartment tower on the left demonstrates the crushing multiplicity of windows caricatured by A. Paul Weber in his drawing "The Rumor." To its right, the Hearst Tower, designed by Norman Foster and completed in 2006, at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street, avoids this effect by adopting a different scale altogether. Despite its greater size, the Hearst Tower is more easily grasped by the eye and mind. Its external skeleton expresses an efficient triangular structural frame that reportedly saved 20% in steel. At least as importantly, it disguises individual floors and windows under a frame of multistory segments that visually simplifies the building and takes it closer to the geometric abstraction of sculpture.

Approaching completion on 23rd Street and cantilevered over the High Line, HL23, a condominium designed by Neil Denari, also expresses diagonal structure in a way that reduces scale. Windows and floors are clearly expressed, but subsumed within an external structural expression that shrinks the building into a discrete machine-age object. Bloomberg architecture critic James Russell has written: "With its elegantly tooled diagonal braces and shiny, embossed metal-panel surface, HL23 is as fluidly feline as a sports car. Denari eases the planar facets of the structure into one another with gentle curves. In wrapping the metal panels around expanses of glass, you see the finesse of a great auto-body designer like Pininfarina."

The 1970 Ferrari 512 Modulo, designed by Pininfarina. The designer's sensibility has been compared to Neil Denari's in HL23, underscoring the building's sculptural aspiration to appear as a cutting-edge industrial design product. Even the building's name seems calculated to suggest a model number.

A recent construction photo shows the ordinary Rust-Oleum painted steel pipe - straight out of a tract house basement - behind HL23's "structural" curves, which are in fact merely silkscreened onto the glass façade. Awaiting interior covers that will make them appear as continuations of a single factory-made uniframe, the pipe sections still on view belie standard field assembly from stock parts. The design is driven by the intended image of a factory-made object rather than technology.

Designed by Jean Nouvel, the Tower Verre is proposed for a site on West 53rd Street next to the Museum of Modern Art. Its exterior steel frame introduces a scale between that of the overall building, which would be among New York's tallest, and its countless human-scaled windows. The frame's deviation from an expected rational pattern like the Hearst Tower's ostensibly responds to the eccentric loads of the building's expressionistic asymmetry. Its spidery irregularity enhances the frame's power to distract the eye from the window grid, and gives the tower a unique and alien identity. In arguing his design's appropriateness to New York's skyline before the City Planning Commission, Nouvel presented it alongside iconic 1920s renderings of windowless, crystalline fantasy buildings by Hugh Ferris (or "U. Ferri," as Nouvel calls him).

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