Filed under: Lost art of doors
For the past few months I have been taking pictures of beautiful/strange doors, mostly in London, in an attempt to showcase what I regard as an often-overlooked piece of architecture. Not only do doors reflect on the building they belong to, but they also imply things about the inhabitants of that property, and what adventures may lie ahead when the door is opened. For each door I’ll try to describe what it was that drew me to it, and maybe write a short piece about what I think might be behind it. All of the door images will be archived on my Flickr stream and will be geo-located using Google Street View.
Without further ado, here is door number one:
There are a lot of reasons why I like this door. If you look at the map you’ll see that it’s camouflaged next to some shuttering. It’s a door within a door, really. I also like how weather-beaten it is, it’s not a door that’s designed or likely to keep people out, it has a more functional role than that. When I walked past once I saw that the building is basically used as storage for the restaurants on the street, with huge drums of oil piled up high next to sacks of rice and flour, and while this might normally take the fun out of the exercise, this fact only serves to complement the image in my mind. I love how understated it is, how you could easily walk past it and not notice it, even though it’s clearly a door that sees a lot of use, that fulfills its purpose. By that same token, though, it’s not boring, it’s unique: the green planks of wood that comprise it are slightly offset from those that make up the surrounding shutter; it’s squat compared to most of the other doors on the road; and, unlike the related material around it, it seems to be shedding its paint and reverting to its original state. Well, after it was cut down in a forest somewhere of course.
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