Walk up to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House in Chicago, finished in 1909, and you’ll have trouble finding the front door. It isn’t on the street side. It’s tucked around on the short end of the house, under the overhang of the second floor. Wright did that on purpose. Finding the way in was meant to be a small act of discovery.
Entrances are where architecture gets to be a host. And the best ones don’t announce themselves so much as change you, a little, between outside and in.
Compress, then release
Wright’s trick at the Robie House, and in plenty of his other houses, is often described as compression and release. You come in low and a little cramped, turn a corner, climb, and then the main room opens up with its long bands of windows. The ceiling feels higher because you were just under a lower one. It’s the cheapest drama in architecture, and it works every time.
Christopher Alexander and his co-authors wrote it down as a rule in A Pattern Language (1977), a book of 253 design patterns that’s still on half the desks in architecture school. Their advice for the path from street to door is to mark it with a change of light, sound, direction, surface and level, and above all, a change of view. Five changes and a view. If you read that line and then walk through your own front door, it’s hard to unsee how many of them are missing.
A step up, and your shoes stay behind
Japan built a whole room for this. The genkan is the entry space just inside the front door of a Japanese home, its floor usually tile, stone or concrete and set lower than the rooms beyond. A raised step marks the edge of the house proper. You leave your outdoor shoes on the lower level, turn them to face the door, and step up in socks or slippers. Built-in shoe cupboards line the walls.
As a distinct architectural feature, the genkan took shape in the Edo period, when a formal entry was a mark of status, and later spread to ordinary homes. What we love about it is that the threshold has depth, a few square feet of floor with its own rules. Western houses have mudrooms, which do the same job with none of the ceremony.
The porch, lost and found
For a while, America had its own version, and it faced the street. Porches spread through American houses in the 1800s, helped along by pattern books from Andrew Jackson Downing and others and by cheap mass-produced millwork, until the wraparound Queen Anne porch became a kind of outdoor parlor. President Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his journal in 1873 that the veranda was the best part of his house.
Then the car pulled people away for entertainment, the telephone let them visit without visiting, and air conditioning and television kept them inside at night. Postwar houses traded the front porch for the backyard patio. The National Park Service tells this story in its preservation guidance, and it reads like a short history of American loneliness.
It’s coming back, though. According to the National Association of Home Builders, about 42 percent of new single-family homes had porches in 1994, and by 2022 it was 66.4 percent. The U.S. Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale was called PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity. Generosity is the right word. A porch is a room you give partly to the street!
The lobby as a public room
Scale the porch up and you get the lobby, which in most office buildings is a security desk and a wall of marble designed to tell you to keep moving. The Ford Foundation building in Manhattan, by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, did the opposite in 1968. Its entrance is a twelve-story, skylit atrium with a garden designed by Dan Kiley, and it was open to the public. Office windows look down into it, so the whole building faces inward onto a piece of borrowed nature in the middle of Manhattan.
A $205 million renovation by Gensler, finished around the building’s 50th anniversary, expanded the publicly accessible space by about half, and Raymond Jungles reworked the garden closer to Kiley’s original intent. We can’t think of a better argument for what an entrance can be. Not a checkpoint. A gift that happens to have an elevator bank behind it.
And then there’s the opposite approach, which Carlo Scarpa took at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice. Commissioned in 1961 to rework the palazzo’s ground floor, he gave it a new entrance by way of a small bridge of steel, Istrian stone and larch boards across the canal, and he designed the floor to live with the acqua alta rather than keep it out. The water gets an entrance too!
For more doors worth crossing a city for, start with the colorful doors of Mexico, then our guide to the most extraordinary buildings anywhere. If a term here was new, the visual culture glossary has you covered.
