Doors and Doors

Posted by Joe Deegan (Waterville, ME, United States) on 3 September 2008 in Cityscape & Urban.

I have become more interested in doors lately. This one is outside a hardware store on the way home from school. Maybe it’s just the Carl Sandburg poem, but doors have been on my mind. I notice them more than ever since my arrival here.

A door is one of the primary ways a building communicates with the street. Sometimes this communication is deliberate. The door lets you know who (or what) belongs, and whether you are welcome. It mediates public and private space much like a hostess at a restaurant. No one would try to walk in through this garage door, for example. It’s sized for a car— a small European car, to be precise— and has no means of opening it from the outside. These things are obvious.

What interests me more is the way public spaces, and doors in particular, end up communicating something different than what was intended. Because of graffiti or through repeated use or age, some doors speak multiple languages. Their signifying activity is more nuanced than the bread-and-butter parlance of architectural features. Existing at the intersection of design, speech, and unintentional beauty, these spaces present a challenge to passersby and to me.

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