When is a Door Not a Door?

The Imperial War Museum (IWM), London is a great place for looking at innovative ways of getting from one space to another. Here doors, hatches and openings often work under high performance requirements, having to be air-tight, water-tight, or deal with extreme structural loads.  It's a great place to take kids and look at all the innovative ways people can access one space from another.

By comparison, doors in buildings usually follow the same component type, with a door blade, door frame and ironmongery. This conformity results from the economics of the Building Industry and contributes to our largely predictable building environment. Imagine how exciting our world would be if doors in buildings were as varied and individual as the doors, hatches and portals on all the planes, tanks, submarines and shelters seen here.

At Architecture Kids we like experiment with ideas like this and challenge our day-to-day preconceptions of the world. After all, as humans we are not rectangular and do not all move in the same way between spaces. There are lots of ingenious ways we can do that, both individually and as collectively.

So, next time you are in the IWM, Science Museum, or vehicle museum of any type, spend a little time to look at the different ways there are to move between spaces. I bet there's a lot more to think about than you might first imagine.