Entering Architecture: An Initial Approach

The door: the art and power of that threshold, transforming our environment in a beautiful instant. We as humans delineate a line between outside and inside; nature and the built environment; that which defines us and that which we ourselves define. To enter a building is to acknowledge mankind’s manipulation of the natural world. It is to surround ourselves in our own primacy and security. In essence, the door is a symbol of the dynamic play of dominance between mankind and the natural world around us. In framing the passage of our movement between worlds, do we exalt the journey or do we allow the transition to flow subtly across our subconscious? This is the architect’s decision, within which lies a deep responsibility to humanity.

The significance of our physical passage into architectural space is inevitably a subconscious transition. Like the significance of a drinking glass to water, the door is a cog in the mechanism of our instinctive survival. We use it as is necessary to secure our own comfort and longevity. Humans attribute value to the survival experience through aesthetic embellishment and the establishment of spatial hierarchies. Within this sense of value, the door becomes the approaching human’s first tactile perception of the space within.

Historically, the importance of architectural structure in society is distinguished by the hierarchical organization of space leading up to and through the door. Visualize the front façade of a gothic cathedral or a neo-classical courthouse. The grand stairway up to the pillared façade. The pediment crowning the doorway. Or the grand gothic arches over the central cathedral door- oftentimes one of three doorways leading majestically into sacred space within. Vienna’s Schonbrunn Palace is approached only through massive iron gates and the expanse of a grand mall playing the visitor into the opulence of their new environment. Florence’s San Minato Church is a distant edifice on the bluff over the Arno. Its door is separated from the pedestrian lives by a route of twisting paths and stairways, dramatizing a sense of journey and ascension to the final experience of its ornate confines. In providing these grand approaches and gateway aesthetics, the historical exaltation of the door in architecture served to raise architecture to the level of monumentality and civic wonder.

Conversely, the past hundred years has seen a reversion back to structures designed for the common experience, founded in the concepts of universal pragmatism, functionalism, and the traditions of vernacular regionalism. The idea of the building as a machine, or the building as an everyday form, takes much of the emphasis away from the grand approach. It is not practical to have to move up the grand staircase or pass through a dramatic portico in order to enter a building. Accessibility and pragmatic honesty are to be considered. But should practicality and mundanity be the pervading themes of a new architecture?

Designing architecture on the level of the common man ushers in this new challenge: in meeting the common man face to face, does the architect sacrifice grand themes inherent to man’s dynamics with nature and to his own transcendence as a creator? Does the journey through the gates and under the gothic portal offer us a view of ourselves that is critical to our realization of who we are in this world, beings of Nature and of God? Or should that dramatization just be subtly whispered at our level as simple men and women moving subconsciously through the human experience?

I offer up an example of this crux as experienced daily in modern society. Take the public gathering spaces built as recently as 80 to 100 years ago, existing today as monuments to stone and brick. Churches, government buildings, museums: these structures towered over the pedestrians on the sidewalks. They beckoned them to rise above the street level and appreciate the transcendent values of their society – history, religion, democracy. Then enter the automobile, fields of pavement, and the dependence of the city on the parking lot. The grand stairways and porticos remained, rising off the quieting sidewalks. But a new door was opened in the building- plain, unadorned, and connecting the parking lots with the back of the building. The drama of the old entrance was replaced by the efficiency and proximity of the new, catering to the modern circulation habits of today’s city dwellers. Inside, no foyer greets the visitor, but merely a long row of fluorescent lights, connecting the pedestrian circuitously to the existing primary functions of the space. The hierarchy is broken. No longer is the pedestrian propelled through the front doors and into a transcending importance of interlocking spaces. The dramatic movement through the foyer and into the nave or the courtroom or the atrium upon which all functions are corporeally centered is abandoned because the main entrance has been stripped of its function. The front doors have merely become a pretty symbol to history and ritual, functionally replaced by the convenience of the parking lot entrance. The new disorganization of space has caused man to forget the beauty of the transition between the outside and the inside and to regard buildings as dull machines devoid of value.

In many cases, given the inflexibility of old buildings, there is no clear way to alleviate the mundanity of this circulation shift. Learning from this, new buildings are no longer oriented to the street, but now have their entrances turned to the parking lot. The hierarchy of space has been recovered by way of twisting the functions on axis. Unfortunately the once grand approach has never been recovered. Because the doors now address the concrete parking lot, there is little incentive to exalt them. The hierarchy of space within remains, but there is little appreciation for the approach. This is leading to the dehumanization of today’s architecture and is entangled with much of the urban sprawl paving over our lives. There is little connection between the building and the city any longer. The only connection left is a weak threshold between the building and the parking lot.

The challenge for architecture today is clear: we must regain that sense of transcendent movement across the threshold. Our psychological connection between the natural world and the spaces we have ourselves shaped is dependent on our future treatment of the architectural transition between these spaces. Otherwise, everything around us will be perceived by future generations as something to use and to throw away. We will inevitably begin to deny the value of our own natural environment, our own architectural space, and ultimately ourselves as humans.

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