The entrance, the corridor, the doorway. How moments of passage and transition shape our psychological experience of the home.
The entrance to a house is not a door. It is a sequence: the approach, the gate or garden, the threshold, the hall, and only then the interior. Each element mediates between the public realm of the street and the private realm of the home.
In much contemporary residential architecture, this sequence has been compressed or eliminated. The front door opens directly from the street. The hallway has been removed to maximize net floor area.
The hallway performs an essential function that is spatial, practical, and psychological. It is the decompression chamber between the outside world and the domestic interior.
These observations point toward a conception of domestic architecture organized not around rooms but around transitions — around the sequences of spatial experience that constitute the lived reality of the home.
