ThresholdsPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1162/thld_a_00766
Amy A. Foley
{"title":"The Paradox of Door-Keeping: Access and Absurdity, Then and Now","authors":"Amy A. Foley","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00766","url":null,"abstract":"While conducting research in the Franz Kafka archives of the Bodleian Library of Oxford University in 2019, I understood concretely the dark logic of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson’s structural world. The absurd dream architectures of the Alice books by the author we know as Lewis Carroll emanate from the built place itself. A lecturer of mathematics at Christ Church, Carroll became famous with his publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There in 1871. Segmented by walls and punctuated by sudden openings, the insurmountable reality of Oxford’s architecture testifies to its institutional culture of hierarchy, separation, and inaccessibility. Oxford’s thirteenth-century stone walls enclose buildings from the late Anglo-Saxon period during the eleventh century through the twenty-first century. Original Gothic architecture and Victorian Revival forms dominate the skyline visible just above the top of the walls, with varied combinations of gates, towers, spires, domes, rib vaults, buttresses, stained glass, and narrow windows. Even newer colleges built during the seventeenth century such as Brasenose, its gabled dormers and pale yellow stonework a charming relief from the dark and weathered thirteenth-century town walls, cohere with the experience of repetition and imposition while travelling alongside Oxford’s walls. However dominant its walls may seem, Oxford’s doors are truly the keys to its logic. Though doors everywhere and throughout time speak to our shared concepts of protection, permission, and access, these doors speak the particular language of door-keeping. I illustrate the relatively continuous logic of locked doors before and after 9/11, using the examples of Oxford architectures, Carroll’s paradoxical Victorian doors, and the automatic locking doors of airplanes in the twenty-first century.","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"195-207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64448988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ThresholdsPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1162/thld_a_00747
Lisa Haber-Thomson
{"title":"Speculations on a Future for the Concept of Precedents","authors":"Lisa Haber-Thomson","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00747","url":null,"abstract":"It is never easy to determine what ought to be included in introductory architectural history classes. How do we select a set of buildings that might adequately demonstrate the field’s changing contours over time?1 The question of what architectural projects to introduce in design curriculum core classes, at least for historians teaching in professional programs, carries with it a specific kind of stakes. Architectural history serves, in part, to ground the discourse surrounding contemporary practice. The default historical canon introduced in school, more than merely telling one version of the discipline’s story, has also become coterminous with a set of precedents that form the basis for architectural judgment. A canon is useful—not only for reinscribing disciplinary values, but also because it provides a common set of reference points. Maybe because it is so useful—and despite ongoing work towards its expansion—the architectural canon is obstinate; it is sticky.","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"89-97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43779726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ThresholdsPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1162/thld_a_00758
Kwan Queenie Li
{"title":"Poems are the Unleashed Tides of Muteness","authors":"Kwan Queenie Li","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00758","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"186-193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41772059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ThresholdsPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1162/thld_a_00769
Timothy A. D. Hyde, Deborah Garcia, Xiomara Alvarez
{"title":"Thresholds Revisited: Turning the Black Box into a Great Gizmo","authors":"Timothy A. D. Hyde, Deborah Garcia, Xiomara Alvarez","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00769","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00769","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"309-319"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42136230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ThresholdsPub Date : 2022-04-01DOI: 10.1162/thld_a_00767
Liz Galvez, L. Yarina, C. Bode
{"title":"The Unbearable Tightness of Building","authors":"Liz Galvez, L. Yarina, C. Bode","doi":"10.1162/thld_a_00767","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/thld_a_00767","url":null,"abstract":"To environ means to surround. Today, to surround translates as built enclosure.2 Enclosures remove the discomforts of the outside world and of our premodern lives; lives no longer reliant on the earth’s temperament and geographic specificity. If “the primary task of architecture is to act in man’s favor; to interpose itself between man and his natural surroundings in order to remove the environmental load from his shoulders,”3 then a building is an effort to create a “small controlled environment” within a larger, more unruly (and less comfortable) natural world.4 The building envelope theoretically and materially delineates society from nature: it forms a dividing line between the environs that can be controlled and those that cannot. In modern buildings, favorable atmospheres are defined by a membrane that serves to delineate environments and mechanical technologies that act on the atmosphere itself.5","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":"271-288"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42335671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ThresholdsPub Date : 2021-04-01DOI: 10.1162/THLD_A_00730
Mark M. Jarzombek, Vikramaditya Prakash
{"title":"A House Deconstructed: An Uncertainty\u0000 Manifesto","authors":"Mark M. Jarzombek, Vikramaditya Prakash","doi":"10.1162/THLD_A_00730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1162/THLD_A_00730","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40067,"journal":{"name":"Thresholds","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41317022","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}