ABSTRACT
A threshold is a point where the boundary between inside and outside can be opened; space loosens up, and a wide range of perceptions, movements and social encounters become possible. As Norberg-Schulz notes, “the opening is the element that makes the place come alive, because the basis of any life is interaction” (1971: 25). A threshold is also a restricted space; its design always constrains people’s behavior and their perceptions (Hillier and Hanson 1984). Because of these in-between, both–and, inside–outside qualities, thresholds are always loose for playful possibilities. Many different architectural elements distinguish inside from outside and mediate people’s passage between them: doorways, turnstiles, colonnades, marquees, porches, terraces, stairways and stoops. Each provides distinctive perceptual, behavioral, social and symbolic affordances. Observations of a diversity of playful social activities around the exterior thresholds of buildings in Melbourne, Berlin and London reveal a multiplicity of ways in which thresholds, even though they are designed as control mechanisms, are actually surprisingly loose.
