Alice slid down a rabbit hole into Wonderland, into a long hallway with doors of different sizes which led her to amazing adventures in the Lewis Carroll book.
In Alice’s case, doors didn’t get her to where she thought she was going. Some were too big that she couldn’t reach the keyhole or she had to shrink herself to fit into the others.
The doors we go through each day may not feel as if they evoke the same drama as Alice’s, but they do transition us from here to there and get us from where we are to where we are headed.
Countless times each day we open doors to get us through to the other side of where we are going. It’s such a routine thing to do that we don’t think there is anything special happening, but there is.
Entering a church, for example, is a special experience. High, solid doors open from the brightness and noise of the street into a serene, dim, quiet world in which a lofty ceiling dwarfs pilgrims.
The same kind of transition happens when entering a government building. Behind a colonnaded portico stands a set of massive, forbidding doors that lead to an impressive marble-clad foyer that elicits awe (or is it submissiveness?) upon entering a building where power resides.
The older government buildings work better at communicating power. Think of entering the Manila Post Office, or the National Museum or Department of Tourism, the twin buildings at Agrifina Circle on the Taft Avenue side of Rizal Park.
Awe and grandeur
The main National Museum Building on Burgos Drive communicates awe and grandeur the moment you step into its lobby. The entrance portico has the stateliness and magnificence you would expect of a royal residence.
Part of going to the theater is making a grand entrance, whether it be to the old 1930s Metropolitan Theater in Manila or the not-so-old 1960s Cultural Center of the Philippines. Essential in the grand entrance is the act of arriving, of alighting from your car and gliding through the doors held open by a liveried doorman. On the inside, stairs sweep upward beneath tinkling chandeliers. It’s drama of the best kind.
Drama of another kind is sweeping through the entrance of an upmarket mall, the kind with those shops that carry all those luxurious “must-haves” that everyone wants but cannot have.
There one moves from the bright sunlight into an even brighter lobby lit to brilliance by lights. Glass panes bounce reflection everywhere but the focus is on the shop windows where the objects of desire await.
In churches and older government buildings, the architecture holds center stage. On the other hand, in the contemporary mall, true to its function, it is the merchandise and shoppers who take center stage.
Entries can uplift as well as suppress, as a hole in the wall constricts a person who enters into a dark, depressing place. The spirit of irony works well here; there are holes in fortified walls that open into grand interior spaces and leafy inner courtyards.
An experience etched in my memory is entering a small provincial jail, walking through a short, dark tunnel that led from the outside to the inside where inmates were behind bars in cells around the perimeter of a hot, concrete-paved central courtyard. All eyes were on us. We were totally unwelcome. I wished I were somewhere else.
Fortifications are designed to be as unwelcome as possible. Sentries man gates. In old forts, pulling up a drawbridge closes off all contact with the outside.
Intramuros is a good example. Sentries man its gates. Although once surrounded by a moat that now has become a golf course, drawbridges no longer seal its gates at night.
Today, sentries man gates to many residential enclaves. Stopped by elaborate entrance markers, outsiders are screened while barriers open to allow insiders to enter into a private world.
Doorways are portals that demarcate and connect different worlds or places.
Crossing a portal elicits subconscious feelings of awe, reverence, joy, guilt or oppression. They prepare you for where you are going, and set the mood for arrival.
Open your door, step away from the past year and enter into the brightness of 2012.
Your comments are invited at pride.place@villalonarchitects.com