Horrible entrances | ArchitectureAu

Our a rich and educated culture in dire need of renewal. Why then are our solutions so banal?

After all, moving in is an action filled with meaning. To move between internal and external, to cross a threshold, means to move between worlds. It shines with experimental and architectural potential. But look over your day: chances are his countless entrances – apartment, office, daycare, shopping mall, cinema, university or pub – all fall somewhere between boring and downright hostile. Is this simple carelessness? Or is there some weird self-hatred at work here? Is our own life not worth it?

In 1851, the respected German theorist Gottfried Semper argued that the four elements of architecture were hearth, roof, enclosure and mound. He didn’t mention the entrance. I didn’t have to. Everyone took the thoughtfulness and sublimity of the entrance for granted.

About a century later, when Christopher Alexander and others published 253 “patterns” of their template language in 1977, the question of entry came under careful remedial scrutiny, as it was by then necessary. The architecture of the entrance shrank from applause to apology. What happened to cause this shift? In a word, modernism.

Between them, Corbusier’s five points of architecture, published in 1923, were: pilotis, free plan, free façade composition, horizontal stripe windows and roof garden. Login failed. But since then, the entry celebration has not been taken for granted, but has attracted strong condemnation.

Tradition has always awaited this holiday. From the carved and contoured doors of even the humblest Gothic church to the classical pedimented colonnade, entrances to public buildings – offices, shops, banks, churches, galleries, museums and schools – were always meant to be elevated, thoughtful, obvious and inspiring. But by the end of the twentieth century, you’ll be lucky if you can find your way in at all.

In home planning, this is all pretty familiar. The suburban house of modernity consciously eschewed even those vestiges of orthodox symmetry and street address that clung to the interwar bungalow. Instead, the mid-century home was often deliberately exposed to the side, to the sun or to the backyard, with the entryway set back to such an extent. Citizenship played no role here. Suburbia was about the individual, the nuclear family, the myth of man’s loneliness, and Adam’s home in heaven.

Modernism’s iconic glass houses sought to demystify this romance, to erase the threshold – from Mies’ house in Farnsworth to Philip Johnson’s house in New Canaan, from Paul Schierbart’s 1914 love letter to “glass architecture letting in sunlight, moon and stars… through every possible wall” ” to Rayner Banham and François Dallegret’s 1965 Un-House, in which naked people, all their needs satisfied, lived serenely inside a transparent bubble. Like so much else in modernism, this idea stumbled and fell over the truth of human nature; We are not placid chimpanzees. Naturally, all these houses were uninhabitable. But this only increased the power of the dream.

What was even more unusual was how even large public buildings played out the same story. Consider the Sydney Opera House. This fabulous confection is probably the most public of Australia’s public buildings; a magnificent, majestic expressionist gesture. However, there is no entrance door. The goal is amazing, but the impressions are tinged with disappointment. You come in diamonds and stilettos, like you would at the Paris Opera, say, for dinner or Tosca. “Come here,” says the architecture, beckoning you up a sweeping staircase to a large pointed arch. Come, I will take you into the great floating space within.

But the promise is false. You go up the stairs and discover that, of course, there is a door, but it is a sad little housekeeping thing – small, unnoticed and often closed. In fact, to enter the building, you must go down the same stairs and, turning around, enter, oddly enough, sideways, through a ribbed and smoke-filled underground floor. Even when you finally get inside, there is no grandiose floating space or jubilant awe. Just a vague feeling that there is nothing special there.

The Australian Parliament building, led by Aldo Giurgola, suffers from the same disease: the entrance gesture is so large that it cuts across the entire landscape of federal territory, lake and all. But the doorway itself and the feeling of entering are bland and tasteless.

This was no accident. Modernism, opposing historical formalism, consciously rejected the rules and rituals of the old world. This was to be the American Century, a world of optimism and equality. Modernity (said the dream) will free us from the differences and divisions that fettered previous generations. From now on, everything from manners to architecture will be simple, relaxed and non-hierarchical.

We now know how little of this openness was superficial, how easily it was captured by corporatism, how dramatically the egalitarian dream was overturned. We also see, in every moment of our lives, how the care of being welcomed is thrown out with the bath water.

Take a shopping center. The Mid-American originals of the 1950s were deliberately featureless boxes surrounded by neat strips of parking lots. These days, such malls sometimes open onto the street, but even then, most visitors still arrive by car. This is to be expected: after all, the purpose of the mall is to promote a culture of car addiction. So even the grandest, most ostentatious, mirror-walled shopping malls can usually be entered through a dull and confusing concrete parking lot.

It’s the same with a standard apartment building. You know the story. Up until the 1930s, even modest residences greeted the street with polished brass, revolving doors, cantilevered awnings, walnut veneers, mirrored paneling, and etched glass that were designed to flatter and grace all comers.

Office buildings are the same. They may have had dark interior light wells and painted concrete staircases above the second floor, but office buildings of the era featured foyers with all the polish and marble needed to highlight the entrance. Now it’s the other way around. Private spaces are often very grand, but most types of buildings have public access through a soulless, no-frills car park.

It’s not that we don’t know it. Back in the 70s, Christopher Alexander advised: “The shortest route from a parked car to the house should be the main entrance. Make the space between home and car a positive space that supports the experience of coming and going. The automotive space should also be taken seriously and made beautiful.”

Why is this important? How we organize our lives also determines how we understand ourselves and build our culture. If our civilian life is boring and utilitarian, then so will our culture. Worse, we will spend our lives fleeing the cities we have built to pollute and destroy the nature on which we depend for survival. How to fix this? Can we re-enchant our cities?

Entrance, as a transition between one world and another, represents a huge opportunity here. The coincidence of the noun “entrance” and the verb “to enter” may be a simple etymological accident. But there is a hint. Entering should be a moment of delight, the romance of another place.

A memorable example for me is a Tokyo ryokan I once stayed at. Characteristically unassuming, its entrance was nevertheless carefully planned to indicate the attitude and manners that the interior required. To walk through the front door was to simultaneously step over a wooden support and duck under the hanging fabrics at the entrance, an act of physical self-diminution that immediately put you into a state of respect befitting the Lilliputian world of wood and paper. within.

Sacred buildings are also practiced on the threshold as they offer a world consciously separated from the ordinary. For example, one of the best entrances to Sydney is the pointed red door of Christ Church St Lawrence near Central Station. From the everyday din and clatter of Railway Square, you pass through the base of a stone spire from which bells cascade cascading down into the ancient, incense-drenched silence within.

We generally consider such lyricism a luxury. But this is a mistake. Poetry is fundamental to who we are. Our architecture must remember this, must constantly relearn new ways to glorify not its own genius, but the ordinary, extraordinary genius of everyday human life. Only by realizing ourselves not as primates or robots, but as complex and subtle beings who intuitively respond to poetry – only by integrating such poetry into our daily lives – will we begin to love our cities so much that we stop loving nature to death.