Doorknob

by Mical, Thomas; Schaberg, Christopher; Bogost, Ian

• ISBN13: 9781501303111
• ISBN10: 1501303112
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2017-03-09
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In Doorknob, architecture and design scholar Thomas Mical explores a commonplace device that under closer scrutiny becomes a wonderful and slightly surreal mechanism of transformation. Inviting readers to look again at this everyday object, Mical shows how the doorknob can be understood as thing, as process, as transitional object, as the machine of arrival and escape, drawing upon examples from design, life, art, and mechanics.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

Author Biography

Thomas Mical is Associate Professor of Architecture and Acting Associate Head of School for Research: Art, Architecture, and Design at the University of South Australia. He is the author of Surrealism and Architecture (2005).

Table of Contents

1. The intimate interface
2. A short material history
3. The existentialist doorknob
4. Doorknobs and interior space
5. The erotic keyhole and chaste space
6. Closing the cinematic trope of the door ajar
7. Finite variations of the door slam
8. Contagion scenarios
9. The post-humanist doorknob
Index