Doors
Wikipedia defines a door as as “a hinged or otherwise movable barrier that allows ingress (entry) into and egress (exit) from an enclosure,” a captivating description that’s undoubtedly being used to train an AI model somewhere in the world with widely varying results. Doors are transitionary spaces from the indoors to the outdoors, or from one indoor enclosure to a connecting one. But unlike passing through an airport or watching the light change at dusk, our time spent interacting with doors is short, awkward, and underwhelming. We fiddle with keys and locks, we push against unnecessarily strong dampers that continually try to force the door shut on us, and we use our bodies to undignifiably heave ourselves into the door while our hands are busy serving our fanatical determination to carry all five grocery bags in one trip. There is no moment of appreciation or reflection when you interact with a door as there is when you watch an airplane take off at an airport or when you look up at the sky to see the scattering light of a dazzling sunset. Doors are mostly forgettable, inconvenient experiences that we get through as fast as possible to get to the other side.
It is precisely because doors as so unmemorable that we typically don’t think about them too much. When asked on the spot to imagine a door, you might conjure up an image of a classic hinge door typically seen gracing entrances and interior walls. But there’s dozens of different types of doors, all functioning with unique mechanisms and serving different purposes. For example, sliding doors shift away like a screen transitioning out of view to reveal what’s behind them, without nudging us to move out of the way to make room for a swinging door. These are typically seen in the form of glass sliding doors that automatically open for us as we walk into them. They can feel magical when they work right and unbelievably inconvenient when they don’t, with those extra few milliseconds that they take to slide open being enough to interrupt our walking pace or in the worst cases, forcing us to come to a complete stop in front of them as they take their time to slowly slide open.
Revolving doors, often seen at the entrances to hotels or downtown office buildings, act as a budget airlock, allowing for minimal loss of heating or cooling by efficiently limiting the time that the interiors are exposed to the exterior. They’re also efficient in that they allow lots of people to enter and exit simultaneously, without anyone needing to hold doors open. Automated revolving doors also exist, and it’s quite the experience to witness the dance of someone using one for the first time, beginning with them precisely timing their entrance into the door, keeping pace with the angular velocity of the rotation, and exiting in the short window of time before they’re forced to begrudgingly walk around the entire loop again. It’s one of many examples where interacting with a door demands specific actions from the humans passing through it.
Saloon doors that are frequently portrayed in old westerns, feature bi-directional hinges which allow them to swing open on either side. This means that intoxicated patrons won’t have to think twice about how to interact with the door on their way out. These doors also served the additional benefits of letting in fresh air to the otherwise smoky interior as well as allowing hands-free passage for the staff carrying crates of booze in and out of the saloon. A more practical full-door version of these are visible in places like restaurants today, where the doors don’t have any handles or knobs and can’t actually be locked but are just used to provide separation between the kitchen and the dining area while still allowing waiters with hands full of plates to quickly pass through. The gentrified version of this is the modern pivot door, seen in today’s minimalist celebrity bunker-houses with the hidden hinges allowing them to seamlessly blend in with the surrounding façade, elegantly yet unexpectedly opening directly from a wall or from behind a mirror.
Elevator doors are a unique type of door that humans use when we wish to vertically displace ourselves. They’re the only type of door that we have to manually command with a button and wait for to open. Interacting with an elevator door is usually a dead giveaway at the age of the building, causing many would-be elevator users to consider just maybe taking the stairs instead at the first sight of the old scissor-style doors on the elevator. Elevator doors are also the backdrop to a fascinating theater of human-to-human interaction, with strangers often being obliged to make polite conversation until the doors open (varying with cultural norms) and dancing around the awkwardness of looking for the “Door Open” button as someone else is trying to rush into the elevator, only to hit “Door Close” on accident and watching the hope fade from their face as they are denied entry by the shutting doors.
And then there’s trapdoors. We typically don’t think of trapdoors as real “doors”, but who’s to say they’re not? They serve the same functional purpose as a door, just horizontally and on the floor. It’s not uncommon to see trapdoors listed as one of the options on the horror movie bingo card, often being featured as the entrance to a cellar that plays host to a dark secret with a climactic reveal. Trapdoors can also be seen in unexpected places like a theater stage, where magicians or dancers leverage fast-opening utility of a trapdoor to suddenly fall through the stage as part of a trick or an outfit swap. A modern re-imagination of the trapdoor is seen on ships to provide access to the upper deck, but they’re referred to as “hatches” on ships, certainly a more inviting name.
Trapdoors are, in fact, the deadliest type of door. They have most definitely killed more people than any other type of door, thanks to them featuring heavily in the gallows where victims were made to stand on a trapdoor that opened up and let them freefall while the noose around their necks finished the job. Yes, we designed doors to intentionally kill our own kind too, allowing swift passage from life to the afterlife. Statistically speaking, a trapdoor is most likely to be the last door that a human “interacts” with, yet another seed that I’m curious to see what the AI model does with.
All of our vehicles have doors, of course, custom-built to the shape and form of every variation of automobile. Aside from elevator doors, doors on vehicles are the only ones that you can close in one location and magically open in another, which I assume is how pets think of every car journey. Even within this, there’s flavors of doors. Vans and minivans have sliding doors on the rear to provide a wider opening to easily load and unload large objects. Subway trains, airplanes, buses, and pretty much every transportation vehicle heavily feature sliding doors for this reason.
“Suicide doors” are a rarer type of car door where the rear door is hinged at the back instead of the front. Accidentally opening the rear suicide door of the car while it is in motion causes air to push the door open further, dragging the passenger along the road at high speeds, hence the name (this was before the seatbelt-era). Today, suicide doors feature prominently in high-end luxury vehicles and are a popular choice among VIPs who can choose to exit the vehicle in a more dignified manner as paparazzi line up to take pictures of them at the red carpet. Automobile manufacturers are desperately trying to rename these doors to “coach doors.”
Besides that, the automobile world has no shortage of creativity when it comes to doors; there’s scissor doors, swan doors, butterfly doors, canopy doors, and gull-wing doors, all of which are modeled after some divine movement of a bird’s wings and are usually seen as a gimmick in sports cars. The Tesla Model X famously marketed its “falcon-wing doors” as a selling point, allowing the door to open with less horizontal and vertical clearance than a typical door, especially useful when needing to access the rear in tight parking spots; their true utility over a standard sliding door has been in doubt ever since they debuted.
In the military, specialized transport aircraft like the C130J feature a “ramp door” at the rear, originally built to load and unload heavy cargo and light vehicles. But during wartime, the ramp door was frequently used as the door from which paratroopers jumped out of for special infantry operations either to surprise the opposition or act as backup. In the popular imagination, these ramp doors are seen in life-or-death action set-pieces where a character is desperately trying to catch up to the plane nearly taking off before its ramp door closes, as well as in alien spaceships that dramatically open up their ramp entrance after landing in a cloud of ethereal smoke and fog.
Doors don’t have to be human-centric either. We’ve built a lot of doors specifically for things other than ourselves. Garage doors open with a unique roll-up mechanism for vehicles to enter and exit, doggie doors are built into regular doors to allow our furry friends to freely come and go at their own will, fridge doors come with a special seal to keep the contents at a cool temperature, and stable doors — where the top half of the door could be swung open while keeping the bottom half closed — are used to keep horses in while letting air circulate. Bank vaults come with several layers of arguably over-engineered ring doors that lock into each other in concentric circles, usually seen playing the primary antagonist in any good bank heist film. There are entire manufacturing plants and factories that have doors designed for small products like screws and donuts to enter based on weight and pressure as they’re moving at high speeds on conveyor belts. NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building boasts the largest “doors” in the world, which open to let large rockets and space shuttles that were assembled inside the building to exit onto the launchpad just outside.
The point is, there’s a lot of doors in the world. If you really wanted to stretch the definition of a door, you could categorize almost anything to fit the definition of a door. Manhole covers? The closable lip on the lid of a stainless steel coffee mug? A switch in a circuit closing the loop and allowing current to flow? The shutter on a camera finely controlling the exposure of light? You get the idea. We’ll stick to the traditional definition of doors that we built to grant ourselves (and other objects) access to specific spaces. After all, this is where the most interesting scenes of humans interacting with doors take place.
For as long as they have existed, doors have inconvenienced humans in countless ways. We’ve all been rudely awoken by a roommate closing the door too loudly on their way out or have been mildly irritated by the defining creak of a particular door opening and closing in our house. We may find objects to prop up against the door when we need to hold it open to move something heavy through it and an unfortunate few of us have even had finger injuries due to doors closing too fast on us. These problems necessitated an entire secondary market of objects to improve the way humans interact with doors, ranging from dampers, stoppers, knobs, locks, hooks, chains, and seals. Oddly enough, the times when we happen to think deeply about doors are also the times we’re using these tools to fix something about doors that annoyed us.
There’s some add-ons to doors that are unique to the space they open into, like the signs on public restrooms that switch from “Vacant” to “Occupied” triggered by the door locking from the inside. These doors visually signal to us that it’s not worth trying to open the door when it’s occupied. The most awkward interactions from the restroom door happen when this signal is missing or non-existent, forcing us to physically try opening the restroom door and verify that it is indeed locked from the inside. When it does open, we cautiously push it open as a deliberate warning to any occupant who may have forgotten to lock the restroom door from the inside while going about their business.
On the other extreme, there are doors that try to actively hide their own existence. A secret opening that reveals itself only when a specific “book” is pulled out from a bookshelf, or a wardrobe that unexpectedly swings open to allow passage to a private room. These hidden doors have a functional purpose throughout history. Egyptian pyramids were infamous for having lots of “fake” doors that lead to dead ends inside the pyramids because the builders knew that robbers would try and loot the valuables in the tombs, so these doors were a security measure. Medieval castles also had hidden doors that led to passageways that served as escape routes or hideaways to allow the occupants to survive sieges. The utility of hidden doors has been traded for whimsy over the centuries, today serving as a quirky addition to house listings with the guise of increasing property values.
Humans seeing value in different types of doors isn’t too surprising. After all, we frequently utilize doors to express our own feelings, moods, and behaviors. Walking through a door and then holding it open for a complete stranger twenty feet behind you is considered, at least in American culture, polite. Without uttering a word, you’re conveying that you’re willing to not inconvenience the next visitor with the crude act of needing to physically push open the door. The first person to get to the door in a large group is obligated to hold it open for everyone else to pass through, smiling through their temporal stint as a doorman simply because they walked too fast; they then become the last person in the group, sending the group’s interpersonal dynamics into total chaos.
This gesture of holding doors open would be less significant if its opposite didn’t sting as much; closing the door on someone can be wrongly perceived as you being cross with them. Characters in film and theatre dramatically slam the door behind them as they walk out of a room immediately after an intense argument with the room’s occupant, ensuring that everyone watching is aware of their emotional state. I’ve often had roommates apologize after they walk out of my room by slamming the door just a tad bit too loudly, over-explaining that they weren’t actually angry and just happened to pull on the door too hard. It goes to show the power of doors, bringing one human to apologize to another and clear up any potential misinterpretation of their actions like a bouquet of flowers wishes it could.
Door slamming is even ritualized in politics. There is a position in the Parliament of the United Kingdom known as the “Black Rod,” who also goes by the informal title of “Keeper of the Doors” and is the monarchy’s representative in the UK Parliament. The Black Rod plays a key role in the House of Commons, but the more fascinating aspect of their role has to do with a peculiar ceremony. During the State Opening of the Parliament, as the Black Rod marches up to the House of Commons, they have the doors “officially” slammed in their face. The Black Rod must then strike the doors three times with their trademark ebony staff and verbally respond to questioning, after which the doors open and the Black Rod is granted entrance into the House of Commons. This strange ritual symbolizes the independence of the Commons from the monarchy, literally using the door to the House of Commons to “shut the royals out” in a shrewd display of power.
On the contrary, an open door indicates your willingness to socialize. In American college dorms, students are encouraged to leave the doors to their rooms open for the first couple of weeks of the semester. It’s a way of signaling that they’re open to meeting people and making friends, a welcome invitation for a conversation or a cup of tea. As the weeks go on, fewer doors stay open, marking the end of the season where friend circles form and requiring students to now make plans ahead of time if they wished to hang out with the person behind the closed door. Missing your opportunity to capitalize on the “open doors” phase of your college dorm can have devastating consequences on your social life for the remainder of the year.
Symbolically, doors have a curious cultural connotation. Black Friday in the US has seen customers queuing for hours overnight until the doors officially open and sales begin. There’s an entire game show where contestants pick one of three doors and in hopes of a big reward, popularizing the Monty Hall problem in the public’s conscience through the usage of high-stakes doors. Perhaps most fascinatingly, we metaphorically refer to doors as pathways to opportunity, remarking that the closing of one door leads to the opening of another, despite that not being mechanically linked to how doors actually function in real life at all.
Acquiring the keys to a door carries with it huge cultural weight. Receiving the keys to the door of your significant other’s place marks a leap into the next phase of your relationship, establishing a trust between the two of where you’re also semipermanently living together. When you buy a house, you flaunt the keys to the front door as proof of purchase, indicating a change in your status as a property owner. The keys to doors are the means through which we as a society mark our transition from “outsiders” to “insiders”, where we now have the tools to bypass the barrier that until then impeded our entry to the inside.
Historically, doors have been leveraged to protect private spaces and keep intruders out. Over time, we installed peepholes to see who’s at the door before we answered it to better inform ourselves of strangers. Then we installed alarms and security monitors to alert us when an unauthorized intruder tries to force the door open. Lately, doors have evolved into full-blown surveillance tools complete with cameras that you can remotely access to literally see what your door sees from anywhere in the world in real-time, closing the distance between us and our door even if we’re millions of miles away. No matter where we are, we still care about the doors that guard access to our house.
The prison cell captures the symbolic cruelty of a door better than any other. Flipping the script on the traditional usage of a door, the primary purpose of prison cell doors are to keep prisoners in. While regular bar cells at least have the vertical columns to allow air and light to circulate, the doors to solitary confinement are especially inhumane, with their imposing steel frames and bulky weight casting a bleak shadow on the fate of the imprisoned. Unlike other doors that we design to protect ourselves in the inside from those on the outside, we designed these doors to “punish” the worst offenders by keeping them inside and blocking access to the outside. For every wonderful usage of a door, there’s an equally barbaric and vile one that we’ve managed to invent.
Doors across cultures have also firsthand witnessed the human proclivity to imbue everything in their sight with an air of spiritual fervor. Vastu Shastra, ancient Hindu texts that describe religious architecture and layouts, dictate that the main door to a house must face the north (or north-east direction) to maximize the flow of “positive energy” into the house. Most of the other guidelines involve beautifying the door and the surrounding area, but there’s also specific guidelines on what not to do: you should not paint the door black, not place any water features or animal figurines outside the door, not place any trash cans or mirrors in the surrounding vicinity of a door, and countless more things, as these tend to deteriorate or redirect the cosmic energy in the house. The dedicated Vastu Shastra disciples will even decline or reject financially sound offers to live in these places on account of whether or not the door meets these guidelines.
In Feng Shui, the ancient Chinese practice to orient homes and spaces to maximize the flow of energy, it’s a design crime to have two doors — like a front door and a rear door — that are aligned to each other. According to the practice, a more preferable door alignment is one that lets the energy in through the front door and then meander through all parts of the house before exiting through the rear door; a straight front to rear flow is highly inadvisable. Feng Shui also recommends against the fantastically-named “arguing doors,” where three doors are placed in close proximity to another. Often seen at the terminal ends of a hallway that open into perhaps a closet, a bedroom, and a bathroom on three sides, this cramped arrangement of doors is said to create “negative energy” in the house and lead to troubles for the occupants.
Islamic tradition portrays eight doors as the entryway to heaven — the Doors of Jannah. Each door grants access based on the acts undertaken during a lifetime, like regularly praying, seeking peaceful means to end conflicts, fasting during Ramadan, and donating to charity. There’s even a door that grants access to heaven for those devoted followers who have completed the hajj pilgrimage in Mecca. These doors are unlike any other in they can only be accessed in the afterlife, where faithful devotees spend their entire lives aspiring to gain entry through these doors in the hopes of being allowed to pass through to heaven.
In popular fiction, doors have a wide emotional range, ranging from tense suspenseful scenes where special forces tactically breach a door with explosives all the way to unsettling claustrophobia in films like The Shining where labyrinthine hallways are punctuated with seemingly ordinary doors that can add eerie undertones to any scene. In The Adjustment Bureau, agents heavily leverage special doors that can transport them elsewhere to meddle in people’s lives and ensure compliance to a grander plan. There’s something seemingly unique about not being able to look at what’s behind a door that compels writers and cinematographers to reveal it in a spectacular and unexpected manner.
Magical doors are all over the world in fiction, from the cave door in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves that opens at the sound of “Open Sesame” to a wardrobe door that leads to the enchanting realm of Narnia. From Coraline’s discovery of a door that shows her a parallel universe to Doctor Strange’s portals functioning as doorways in space-time to surgically cutting doorways between worlds by literally slicing through the air with a special knife in The Golden Compass, doors are everywhere. The Harry Potter series is full of magic “doors”, like the door to the Room of Requirement appearing to those that need it, the passage to Platform 9 and 3/4, the door to the Chamber of Secrets, hidden doors behind portraits leading to common rooms, the veiled doorway between life and death in the Ministry of Magic, portkeys, fireplaces, telephone booths, and so many more. Even Stranger Things features doorways between our world and the “upside-down” as a central driving plot throughout its narrative. These doors provide a physical transition from one place to another in an imagined world, grounding us even when fantastical and unbelievable things are happening on-screen. We’re more likely to buy into the idea of someone passing through an opening and appearing elsewhere, simply because it mimics our lived reality of how we expect humans to transition from one space to another through doors.
Doors are also the bane of a very specific group of modern humans — video game developers. Doors in video games are infamous for being extremely tricky to implement, proving to be way more complex than they actually need to be for the functional purpose that they provide in-game. Video game doors feature many quirks, one of which is that they often have to be much larger in scale to their surroundings than real-life doors, since third-person games typically feature a player-controlled camera that follows the character which would otherwise get clipped by the top of the door frame and obstruct any potential threats in the room you’re entering. Video game doors are almost always bidirectional, allowing the player to push the door open from either side to quickly flee to safety from enemies giving chase.
Animating video game doors is especially tricky; having the character physically touch and interact with a handle or a doorknob to swing a door open is an extremely complex animation that’s almost never worth doing. For this reason, many game developers just magically fling the door open as soon as the character nears a trigger boundary in front of the door. Surprisingly, many players don’t mind this sleight of hand and proceed directly through the opened door, never questioning the magical powers that speedily open doors for them when they most need it in that game world. Just as with real life doors, this is one of those interactions that would be immediately noticeable if it was clunky and poorly implemented (not to mention the huge game design implications of a door opening too slowly and resulting in your failed escape), so many developers resort to the magic door method here. There’s a great blog post that highlights this problem in-depth, and it’s amusing to me that an architectural feature so ubiquitous in our everyday lives with tons of reference material readily available (literally at your doorstep) can prove to be so nightmarish to implement and be the sole cause of infinite headaches for this niche segment of software developers.
Despite this, doors in games are sometimes leveraged as a strange, sometimes immersion-breaking roadblock. You can be a powerful fire-slinging sorcerer that has the power to slay mythical dragons and bring down legendary warriors with your flame-scorched greatsword, but you’re stopped dead at the sight of a broken-down wooden door that requires a rusty old key to open and progress into the next area of the game. Door dissonance in games can also be used in unintentional but useful ways. FromSoftware’s Dark Souls games render your character temporarily invincible from enemy attacks while you’re opening a door, and the animation tends to be almost excruciatingly slow. Players can leverage this temporary immunity by running to a door in an unexpectedly tough fight and triggering the door open animation, causing all the enemies around you to slice and slam at nothing in particular as their weapons ghost through your body and you gleefully run out the other side to seek safe haven.
There are games that do give doors center stage. The Fallout series spends a painstaking amount of time animating and showcasing the vault door opening at the start of each game with over-the-top mechanized movements and visual effects. Zero North Zero West is a surreal, dreamy game that has you traveling through different doors to enter trance-like, psychedelic dimensions. God of War features doors that grants access to the nine realms of Norse mythology complete with intricately detailed carvings of the gods and stories in that realm. Control, a game where ritualized bureaucracy meets the occult, has a special sequence called the Ashtray Maze that heavily features doors that constantly warp and twist the world around you in incredibly kaleidoscopic patterns, invoking the space around you with a spiritual and mystic aura that doors don’t typically get to exhibit. I especially love watching special animation sequences of how important doors in the games I play open; there’s something about game developers infusing an object so ordinary with effects so special that make it feel extremely rewarding, especially given how much of a pain they can be to even get working right.
Our relationship to doors are undoubtedly defined by the ones we use most frequently, perhaps that’s a specific door in your building or at your workplace. Maybe it’s your car door or the door to the subway train you take the most. We go about our daily lives interacting with this fascinating architectural object without thinking too much about it, except when it doesn’t work correctly. Perhaps your childhood was defined by your bedroom door that you insisted was kept open when you slept at night, or maybe you really hated the creaking sound of the entrance door to the first apartment you ever lived in. No matter what the reason, doors have taken non-consensually taken up a lot of space in the back of your mind over the years, and I think it’s important to bring that to the forefront by celebrating the wonders, pitfalls, and bizarreness of this fascinating, delightful, and often mischievous movable barrier that allows ingress into and egress from an enclosure.