OPEN SESAME

摘要

Openings have a major influence on the personality of a building. The entrance door is the users' first tactile experience; alternatively, a simple window opening - whether recessed, flush or projecting - is a powerful tool to introduce order or obscure it. By no means limited to the aesthetic, the environmental management is profoundly linked to the openings. Reyner Banham informed us in his 1969 treatise, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment, that windows 'operate to expel unwanted conditions from within and to admit desirable conditions from outside'; this is all well and good provided the user is not opening windows during winter because they're too hot. The method of a low-energy, user-controllable environment is as important to the bill payer as it is to the specifier - openings have a history of culpability in energy loss. It is due only to their technological advancements keeping pace with legislation that they retain a major role in modern building, enabling the large, glazed elements of Le Corbusier's Five Points of Architecture to remain in our built language.