The birth of a door

The birth of a door

When I see a floor plan sketch, there are two things I recognise: the spaces and visual elements that denote some attempt at arranging the spaces. If the spaces are clear enough, then I can imagine the doors that connect them: where two spaces touch each other, there is a possibility for a door. Sometimes the doors that are coming out of the sketch are all of the same kind, like office doors along a corridor or classroom doors around a hall: all clearly identifiable, dominant features in that space. In other cases, they're not evident in the way spaces touch but I know they're there, like the entrance to a building. Quite often it's easy to see which space could connect the undefined outdoors to the emerging indoors. These are often special doors, sometimes one of a kind, like the entrance to a castle or a cathedral.

So, I'm not surprised when I see a finished floor plan with some door missing. The designers may feel embarrassed that they've drawn a space without an entrance but I sympathise: it's easy to forget what already exists in one's mind, a thing so obvious as a door. At the same time, I wonder: how could they forget it? Do they have a complete picture of the design, of how people move around in it without all doors clearly marked and at least mentally connected into networks and flows? But then, architecture isn't always about how people use a building. That's why some doors are born only after people occupy a building and realise that they're missing something, that there are doors there waiting to be born.

What every door should know about itself

What every door should know about itself

Doors have a fascinating duality. Open they become space, part of the 'voids' of architecture: a hole that connects two spaces. Closed they are 'solids': building elements that separate the two spaces. Their interactionwieh humans can be complex, allowing first of all change between the two states of open and closed, as well as recognisable variation in between: ajar, half open, half closed - many recognisable states, often with specific maning.

This duality and interaction makes doors critical for the behaviour and performance of a building. It also makes them prime candidates for intelligent behaviour of the kind that delights me: local, practical, modest. Such intelligence can be observed both n real life, with automatically opening doors and similarly smart recognition of the user, and in design representations, with doors sticking to their walls or otherwise becoming attuned to their context.

What delights me above all is that such intelligence, certainly in a design representation, can be made possible by collecting all constraints on a door and using them to determine the behaviour of the door symbol. It's an interesting perspective: when the door knows enough about itself, it can become intelligent.

Rituals of access

Rituals of access

In Andrea Camilleri's Paper Moon, following frustrating experience with a secure bank entrance, inspector Montalbano considers writing a text on the ceremony of access and how it is intended to make you feel secure while there is no guarantee that you actually are. This is something more and more people realising with various security measures, including the demanding ones at airports. However, such rituals predate current security issues and are built in the affordances many entrances. For example, revolving doors are intended to restrict air flow and reduce drafts between indoors and outdoors. They also regulate pedestrian flow, making us slow down and go in or out in small numbers, ensuring that we've paid a ticket or that we don't go in the wrong direction (as with turnstiles). They manage to constrain our behaviour so effectively that we seldom rebel against their tyranny; we accept them as part of the experience and even welcome the adjustment they offer. When I see unobtrusive yet major design successes, I realise how natural the built environment can be.