SOMETIME IN 1975, Pierre Buraglio began gathering discarded windows from demolition sites in Paris. Pickings were plentiful. The fourteenth arrondissement, where he had a studio, was undergoing extensive redevelopment, part of a broader wave of modernization exemplified by the recently built skyscraper Tour Montparnasse. The artist had opposed this trend, heatedly decrying the likely consequences for the quarter’s working-class inhabitants.1 He was nonetheless drawn to the cast-off fixtures, which he conveyed to a friend’s carpentry workshop. There he transformed them into wall-mounted artworks