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<snip>....  I want to install a large ratio of windows on the
west side of the cabin where the forest view is spectacular but feel a bit
dumb about doing it since I am also putting up tight SIPs. ...<snip>
                                thanks,  Sacie Lambertson

<Gary>:Just in case BUDGET and SOLAR GEOMETRY need a little bolstering, lets not forget Chris Alexander...

##################### Zen View ##################

"... how should we make the most of a view? It turns out that the pattern which anwsers this question helps to govern not the rooms and windows in a building, but the places of transition. " <SNIP>

***
"The archetypal zen view occurs in a famous Japanese house, which gives the pattern its name.

A Buddist monk lived high in the mountains, in a small stone house. Far, far in the distance was the ocean, visible and beautiful in the mountains. But it was not visible from the monk's house itself, nor from the approach road to the house. However, in front of the house there stood a courtyard surrounded by a thick stone wall. As one came to the house, one passed through a gate into this court, and then diagonally across the court to the front door of the house. On the far side of the courtyard there was a slit in the wall, narrow and diagonal, cut throught the thickness of the wall. As a person walked accross the court, at one spot, where his position lined up with the slit in the wall, for an instant, he could see the ocean. And then he was past it once again, and went into the house.

What happens in this courtyard? The view of the distant sea is so restrained that it stays alive forever. Who, that has ever seen that view, can ever forget it? Its power will never fade. Even for the man who lives there, coming past that view day after day for fifty years, it will still be alive.

This is the essence of the problem with any view. It is a beautiful thing. One wants to enjoy it and drink it in every day. But the more open it is, the more obvious, the more it shouts, the sooner it will 
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