Experiential Boundaries

Abstract

Using an analysis of the door’s semantic, utilitarian and its protective potential as provocations and triggers, [Von Meiss, 1998], this proposal will explore doors long history as a strategic boundary device used to control points of entry, egress, or indeed exclusion to a city or inner sanctuary. However, the scenarios which unfold on the door are seldom used to examine the experiential relationships between people, objects and environments in a way which challenges the marketing strategies, and commercial contexts associated with markets and customer satisfaction. The door remains the architectural micro-site of serendipitous social interactions, transactions and occasional transgressions and psychological threshold seen, increasingly in exclusive, security conscious, gated-communities whose technological dependency reveals anxieties of containment and encroachment. Smith and Topham (2012) described this as communities whose experiential encounters are closed-off from others and unwittingly pave the way for domestic designs that imprison free inhabitants in alarmed paradises. This contradiction opens up the experiential aspects of the door to the concept of doubleness recalling Van Eyck’s of the doors two faces -inside or out, raising interesting questions of what one would design first -its inner domestic face or outer defensive skin and as plane(s) in which the world reverses suggesting a new, emergent anatomy and a language for the doorway. Florida State University Department of Interior Architecture & Design; PARADE (Publication & Research in Art, Architectures, Design and Environments); the interdisciplinary research organisation AMPS (Architecture, Media, Politics, Society) and its academic journal Architecture_MPS.