A history of thresholds

More about the book

Thresholds are anthropological constants: they can be found in every culture and every era. Like limits and borders, they express one of humanity's fundamental relations to space. Places where spaces are separated and connected, thresholds are also metaphorically potent across cultures, as passageways where subjectivity is transformed. A History of Thresholds: Life, Death and Rebirth uses the threshold as a guiding thread to explore the meaning and importance that humans have invested in built spaces. The book is a visual narrative about the life, death and--eventually-- rebirth of these thresholds: from the Ancient Greeks to the emergence of the private domain and the transparency of contemporary architecture, which seems to diminish the liminal space of the threshold. A History of Thresholds argues for the need to reinvent the threshold in order to establish a new contract between architecture and humanism.