芬兰建筑设计师尤哈尼•帕拉斯马(Juhani Pallasmaa)称门柄是“与房屋的握手”。建筑设计可能是最有“形”的艺术，但在这种艺术中，视觉却被给予特殊地位——建筑师谈论光线、空间、投影、厚重感、虚无感，但很少讨论质地和重量，以及某物的手感和它对身体施加的影响。
我在这里宣布一件事：十年前，我建立了一家五金制造厂，它让我明白金属器具赋予了我们与建筑本身进行身体接触的体验，这种体验本身并不多见。令人惊讶的是大多数居所仅采用批量生产的标准化产品，这只能让我们了解到一点儿、甚至根本不能了解人们使用建筑的方式，以及从一个空间转换至另一个空间的仪轨和内涵。
房屋前门的图腾是门环，它宣告客人的到来，并使得来访者与建筑产生接触。最古老、最熟悉的设计之一是可能握着球体的一支手，人们可以用此球敲击门板。帕拉斯马可能是错的，与我们最先握手的是门环。门环可能是一只狐狸或狮子的兽首，但它更可能是某种建立在现成的几种经典款式上、不恰当的抽象组合。这种最发自肺腑、最具仪式性动作的含义却经常因为一个轻薄且设计很差的各种形状的结合体而打折。
如果这是你家，你可能会用钥匙开门。这个动作明显包含了性的含义，就像推开房门进入子宫一般的房屋（事实上，信箱的概念也是如此）。然而，这种最具象征意义的动作却很少得到建筑设计的关注——这看起来像一个错失的良机。
漫步穿过维多利亚与艾伯特博物馆(Victoria and Albert Museum)的金属制品艺术廊,它所展现的是许多几乎无法想象、经过精致雕琢和加工的钥匙。从中世纪到文艺复兴时期，这些钥匙曾是仪轨中的神物，表达了内容的宏大，戏弄以及快乐。
进入屋内，门就只有门柄了。你在屋内的行进是被一系列的“握住”和“转动”所定义，这是除了楼梯扶手以外,你与房屋内部事物接触的唯一时刻。最古老的装置是一个指按门栓，它在美国仍很普遍，在文艺复兴后遍地都是门柄的欧洲却不多见。
基本的木质门柄是由一块实心木头制作而成，其制作方式预示着它的用法，以扭转的方式开门。接触门柄所需的特殊动作——“握”，迫使你与该物体产生一种亲密的联系。每位门柄使用者都在上面留下自己的印记；较老的门柄被几千双手上的油渍打磨光滑且颜色变暗。
后来的门柄是金属质地，最复杂的是来自法国宫廷的款式与伟大金匠的压花作品相当。复杂的装饰性图案将书卷和天使脑袋的痕迹浅浅地印于你的掌上，把整个建筑拓在人体的最敏感部位。门柄最初被安装在弹簧锁上，门锁与门柄同样精美；后来到了19世纪，门锁被包裹在厚厚的门体中，露出的只有门柄。大约在同一时期，已经发明了几个世纪的搬把式门柄开始流行，特别是在欧洲。现代派因其工具般的功能主义而欣喜不已。沃尔特•格罗皮乌斯 (Walter Gropius)在1923年的设计可能已经成为鲍豪斯建筑学派最为普及的产品——一个看似简单的物品将圆柱体手柄的圆形和方形以及方形颈状部位和铺首以柏拉图式的完美结合起来——它仍然是现代派最不朽的作品之一。
然而，对现代门柄影响格外巨大的是一位哲学家，虽然这点值得商榷。学习过工程设计的路德维格•维特根施泰因(Ludwig Wittgenstein)在维也纳为姐姐设计房屋。他被管子折服，并用弯曲的金属管制作了一个门柄，门两侧的门柄则不同。这暗示着对不同空间区别的一种认可。这种无处不在的弯曲门柄将建筑设计最具象征意义的动作变成了一种机械功能。
埃德温•希思科特是英国《金融时报》建筑设计评论员及建筑五金制造商izé的创始人
译者/杨卓
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001035111
Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa calls the door handle “the handshake of a building”. Architecture may be the most physical of the arts but it is one in which the sense of vision is privileged – architects talk about light, space, shadow, solid and void, but rarely about texture and weight, about how something feels in the hand or the effects it exerts on the body.
I declare an interest here: I set up a hardware manufacturer a decade ago. It has helped me appreciate how ironmongery presents one of the few moments when we physically engage with the building but also that it’s surprising that most dwellings get by with standard, mass-manufactured products which tell us little or nothing about the way we use a building, about the rituals or meanings of passing from one space to another.
The totem of the front door is the knocker, a mechanism which announces arrival and allows the visitor to engage with the building. One of the oldest, most familiar motifs is that of the hand, perhaps bearing a ball which acts to knock against a backplate. Perhaps Pallasmaa is wrong and it is the knocker which first shakes our hand. It might be a fox or a lion’s head, but more likely is some kind of abstract composition based upon ill-suited off-the-shelf classical motifs. This most visceral and ritual of actions tends to be mediated through a flimsy, poorly conceived amalgam of shapes.
If it is your home, you are likely to use a key. There is an obvious sexual connotation in the action, just as there is in the penetration of the door into the womb-like house (indeed, also in the idea of the letterbox), yet once again, this most symbolic of acts is rarely celebrated in the architecture – a lost opportunity it seems.
A wander through the Victoria and Albert Museum’s metalwork galleries reveals an almost unimaginable array of exquisitely sculpted and wrought keys. Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance these were ritual fetishes which spoke of the grandeur of the contents, teasing and delighting.
Once inside, the doors rely on handles, your progress through the house defined by a series of grips and twists which, apart from the handrail on the stairs, are the only moments you get to engage with the materiality of the interior. The oldest device was a thumb-latch, still popular in the US, far less so in Europe where knobs became ubiquitous after the Renaissance.
The basic wooden knob was turned from a solid lump of timber and the manner of its making foreshadows the way it works, the rotating motion of opening. The particular grip you need to engage with a doorknob forces an intimate relationship with the material. Each user leaves their trace on the timber, older examples polished to a dark sheen through the wear of the traces of oil from thousands of hands.
Later knobs were made of metal, the most elaborate examples from French palaces equalling the repoussé work of the great goldsmiths, elaborate decorative forms which leave the faint imprints of scrolls and cherubs’ heads upon your palm, stamping the architecture on to the most sensitive of flesh. At first the knobs were placed on rim-locks, in which the locks were as decorated as the handles; then, by the 19th century, the lock mechanism became buried in the thickness of the door with only the handles exposed. Around the same time the lever handle, which had been around for centuries, began to become popular, particularly in Europe. The modernists delighted in its tool-like functionalism. Walter Gropius’s 1923 design became perhaps the most ubiquitous product to emerge from the Bauhaus, a deceptively simple object which reconciled the Platonic perfection of the square and the circle in the cylindrical grip and the square neck and backplate – it remains one of the most enduring modernist products.
But it was a philosopher who arguably, and extraordinarily, exerted the greatest impact on the modern handle. Having studied engineering, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was designing his sister’s house in Vienna, became transfixed by pipe and tube and made a handle from bent metal tube which was different on one side than the other. This implied an acknowledgement of the difference between spaces. Ultimately, his tube became the most familiar handle in the world, a simple bent steel pipe seen everywhere from hospitals to homes. The ubiquitous bent tube has reduced the most symbolic of architectural acts to a mechanical function.
Edwin Heathcote is the architecture and design critic of the Financial Times and founder of architectural hardware manufacturer izé
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