112. Entrance Transition Problem: Buildings, and especially houses, with a graceful transition between the street and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street. Solution: Make a transition space between the street and the front door. Bring the path which connects street and entrance through this transition space, and mark it with a change of light, a change of sound, a change of direction, a change of surface, a change of level, perhaps by gateways which make a change of enclosure, and above all with a change of view. Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language Walking through doorways causes forgetting53. Main GatewaysAt the Green MosqueThe wind's pulling us inOne who has trodden this garden pathA more spiritual place transitionsdoors
The door handle is the handshake of a building Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses What is this static modernism? metaphordoorsinteraction
What is this static modernism? Why can't office buildings use doorknobs that are truly knob-like in shape? What is this static modernism that architects of the second tier have imposed on us: steel half-U handles or lathed objects shaped like superdomes, instead of brass, porcelain, or glass knobs? The upstairs doorknobs in the house I grew up in were made of faceted glass. As you extended your fingers to open a door, a cloud of flesh-color would diffuse into the glass from the opposite direction. The knobs were loosely seated in their latch mechanism, and heavy, and the combination of solidity and laxness made for a multiply staged experience as you turned the knob: a smoothness that held intermediary tumbleral fallings-into-position. Few American products recently have been able to capture that same knuckly, orthopedic quality. Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine The door handle is the handshake of a building modernismdoorstouchobjects
Always start at the doorstep If you are having trouble knowing where to start, always start at the doorstep. Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture doorswisdom
At the Green Mosque In Broussa in Asia Minor, at the Green Mosque, you enter by a little doorway of normal human height; a quite small vestibule produces in you the necessary change of scale so that you may appreciate, as against the dimensions of the street and the spot you come from, the dimensions with which is is intended to impress you. Then you can feel the noble size of the mosque and your eyes can take its measure. You are in a great white marble space filled with light. Beyond you can see a second similar space of the same dimensions, but in half-light and raised on several steps (repetition in a minor key); on each side still a smaller space in subdued light; turning round, you have two very small spaces in shade. From full light to shade, a rhythm. Tiny doors and enormous bays. You are captured, you have lost the sense of the common scale. You are enthralled by a sensorial rhythm (light and volume) and by an able use of scale and measure, into a world of its own which tells you what it set out to tell you. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture 112. Entrance Transition doors
Open doors, open minds I suspect the open mind leads to the open door, and the open door tends to lead to the open mind; they reinforce each other. Richard Hamming, You and Your Research doors
Walking through doorways causes forgetting A Research Paper news.nd.edu Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away. Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized. 112. Entrance Transition memoryarchitecturewalkingexitsdoors
The Sense of Style A Book by Steven Pinker Classic styleThe assumption of equalityNominalizationThe curse of knowledgeStructural parallelism+2 More The Elements of Style writingcommunication
Classic style The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. truth
The assumption of equality Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce. Long, unwieldy sentences respect
Nominalization The English language provides bad writers with a dangerous weapon called nominalization: making something into a noun. Instead of affirming an idea, you effect its affirmation; rather than postponing something, you implement a postponement. "Comprehension checks were used as exclusion criteria” would be better said as “we excluded people who failed to understand the instructions.” “There is not any anticipation there will be a cancellation” would be better as “I don’t anticipate that I will have to cancel.” Zombie sounds, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That is what they have in common with the passive constructions that also bog down these examples. language
The curse of knowledge The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows - that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail. Such tortuous syntax knowledgeteachingux
Structural parallelism If the new phrase has the same structure as the preceding one, its words can be slotted into the waiting tree, and the reader will absorb it effortlessly. The pattern is called structural parallelism, and it is one of the oldest tricks in the book for elegant (and often stirring) prose. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.” The principle of parallel construction
You live only once The logician would argue, You only live once should be rewritten as You live only once, with only next to the thing it qualifies, once. The logician would be unbearably pedantic, but there is a grain of good taste in the pedantry. Writing is often clearer and more elegant when a writer pushes an only or a not next to the thing that it quantifies. In 1962 John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.” That sounds a lot classier than “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy but because it is hard." grammar
Such tortuous syntax How does a writer manage to turn out such tortuous syntax? It happens when he shovels phrase after phrase onto the page in the order which each one occurs to him. The problem is that the order in which thoughts occur to the writer is different from the order in which they are easily discovered by a reader. It’s a syntactic version of the curse of knowledge. The writer can see the links among the concepts in his internal web of knowledge, and has forgotten that a reader needs to build an orderly tree to decipher them from his string of words. Who the fuck is Guy Debord?The curse of knowledgeChoose a suitable design and hold to it