notes from Simon Unwin’s ‘Doorway’

Framing the transient moment, doorways stand as reminders of the ‘between’ in which we live… through human history and across all cultures, doorways have possessed great symbolic power and had ceremonies and rituals associated with them.

Human beings apply geometry to the world.  Architecture is a prime vehicle of human geometry. And doorways are a particular manifestation of it.

The sides of a doorway resonate with our sides; the lintol is above our heads and the threshold under our feet.  Its opening is a frame for our form and our passage forward.  As we move through it (in time) the doorway is first in front of us and then behind.  The doorway implies a three-dimensional cross-with six rather than four arms - and is a direct representation of the three space dimensions and one temporal by which we situate ourselves in the world.

…the pupil of the eye is a doorway that allows in the image of the outside world, projects it onto the retina and into the brain within the cell of the skull.

The axis that a doorway creates depends on the geometry given it by the human form.  It is as if we make doorways in our own image.  Just as the axial symmetry of a human body, reinforced by its forward-dominant line of sight and direction of movement, introduces an axis into the world, so too does the body’s image - the doorway.

The doorway axis has been used frequently in religious architecture.  It can establish a linkage between the individual and a sacred object or place - an altar, the image of a god or a sacred place in the distance.  Where it projects the sacred power of an object of place out into the world, the architectural device of the doorway axis becomes an instrument of religious dominion.  

photo: Remi Benali