the elevator door

Things you don't know about elevators via Tudzy

In naming The Doors, Jim Morrison quoted Aldous Huxley's The Art of Seeing by saying "There's the known. And there's the unknown. And what separates them is the door." Arguably one of the most important inventions in modern construction, the elevator allows users rapid vertical movement through space. The elevator physically connects two places, yet in most cases, the users inside are visually unaware of their movement through space. Instead, they are introduced into a third, distinct environment - the elevator cab. The user enters through a door, the door closes, and as far as they are concerned, the physical world outside of the cab is moved to the other side of the door -the same door they entered through. A change of place has occurred with no changing of places. In this case, the door is the link between two known spaces and yet shields the user from many unknown ones. By removing the visual (known) connection with movement-through-space, the physical distance between space becomes abstracted simply into time. Curiously, this may heighten the users sense of the unknown, which may explain the urge for users to silently search for the rhythm of passing floors validating that movement is actually occurring.