PORTALS:What lies beyond?

Talking about the word PORTALS, which generally means openings to access a certain space. It allows one to use it as an entrance and further contributes to the interaction of the individual and the space. In the world of Architecture; doors, windows, and gateways act as one of the main portals. There is much more that could be added to this very term called Portal, for example: nostrils are one of the entrance to the nasal passage, rats create their own portals to escape or which direct link them to food sources in a house which is called Burrows, bees have there own meaning of portal which is beehive, a hole in a bird’s nest etc . So by this, one can conclude that there exists different kinds of portals for different organisms or for different purposes. And what if I question that, are the arches portals? I guess, maybe! So some of the pics below are clicked by me in the streets of Old Delhi…

Portals are often compared to the membranes which are semi- permeable that allows in and out of certain substances, which in this case is “us”. By that I mean, all of the openings like doors and windows act as the semi- permeable substances in a wall, which is a membrane. They also create a sense of what happens inside it and what basically it does is it cultivates expectation of what lies beyond.

A specific type of portal is called PORCH which is a series of portals maintaining the similar kind of geometry, symmetry and there is a sort of repetition. For eg: Tower of Babel, presently in Iraq shows a very detailed idea of porches. They are spaces designed mainly for socializing and and plays a function of visibility and interaction or can be a space acting as a transition. Porches can be different in size by following the same geometry and symmetry. Porches can be different in size by following the same geometry and symmetry. The first pic below is of a mosque in Firoz Shah Kotla, Delhi. I went to this place not to find porches but to just explore and roam around but this is what I ended up finding.

What I learnt is reflected in the class exercise ( time problem) that I did to make portals with scrap and with some specified constraints told by the professors. We were all given a cardboard sheet to use as a base or plot to work on. I had brought some materials like squared foam sheets, thumb pins, paper cups and much more.

1. Making of a membrane with a portal: Talking about what I did, I first tried to think about my scaling device or the reference device. What it does is , helps one to understand the scale of the built structure as a reference to start with. I chose a thumb pin as it was easy to work with and could be easily movable on the cardboard sheet by just pressing it into the cardboard. Conditions: we weren’t allowed to use sticking materials like fevicol or any kind of glue because we were asked to produce a movable structure(model). So I thought of doing some interlocking or by applying the principle of lego blocks. keeping 5 minutes in mind, I scraped off a rectangular shape from the first layer of cardboard which created a space into it, onto which I tried to fix my foam sheet with a round headed portal cut out.