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| No ^ edifice for this complex |
| WHILE STUDYING ARCHITECTURE in college, my classmates and I often battled the school's head of the design department who insisted that a building should have one dominant entrance - a central point in a great edifice that lends focus to the experience of entering the building. This thinking is rooted in the history of architecture, which at the time I studied it focused on the major works of antiquity - places of worship and monuments from empires past. Ancient societies placed great importance on these structures and built them to survive the ages. Thus, any history of architecture through the mid-20th century was pretty much limited to these remaining examples. With the notable exceptions of modern architecture's pioneers - Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Mees van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and others - many then-contemporary works were also rooted in the classics.
This classic formal approach to design fails buildings with modern functions such as transportation centers, sports arenas, and shopping malls. Can you imagine a single, major portal to New Yorks's Grand Central Terminal or Yankee Stadium? (Though these buildings, designed under the influence of the classics, manage to have one entrance that is visually more important than the rest, users of these buildings pay little heed. They enter and exit wherever it is practical to do so.) The resulting congestion at a single portal and the extra walking needed to get from parking lot to single entrance to internal destination would drive most people mad. Today's shopping mall provides a good example of non-competing multiple entry points. Entrances are designed to suit the multiplicity of visitors' needs. Some entrances lead directly to an anchor department store, other entrances lead directly to a concourse. Even public transportation vehicles are given multiple pickup/drop-off points. The entrances may vary in appearance from one another, but none is intended to be the "main" entrance. Similarly, it is at first normal to think that a web site has one main entrance, a home page or a splash page that leads directly to the home page. Practical considerations often dictate other solutions. A multinational corporation has different languages and cultures to deal with. A multi-product/service corporation has very different web visitor interests to consider. A publicly held corporation has web visitors who are principally interested in two very different things: products and services on the one hand and the corporation's suitability for investment on the other hand. All these considerations suggest the need for more than one major entry point. A complex web site may well be structured to accommodate its disparate visitors, being an assemblage of smaller sites much like the mall is an assemblage of stores. EVEN MY OWN SMALL WEB SITE, intended for personal use, now has multiple entrances. (Of course every page is a potential entry point simply because someone can bookmark that page, but when I say "entrance" I'm referring to a planned entry point, one that has the convenience of a certain kind of visitor in mind.) The reason I have multiple entrances is that my site has widely varied subject matter. The topics covered are inclusively interesting to me, but not necessarily to anyone else. By adding more entrances, visitors interested in trains and trolleys, for example, can enter at the Rail WORKS page and need never know about the Design WORKS page intended for people interested in online design, though of course either group can find the other page without much difficulty. Changing from one entrance to several entrances introduced complications of orientation and navigation that would have been easier to deal with had I anticipated such a change when I first laid out my site. I think I dodged the bullet this time. Next time I'll plan for multiple entrances.
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Design WORKS
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| ©2001 Alfred Barten. All rights reserved. | Page created 25 April 2001. | Last updated 3 December 2001 |