Perpetual Revolution

Because I do not hope to turn again . . .
T. S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday (1930)

1.

Contrary to the expectations that might be engendered by its title, this essay does not concern itself in any way with unorthodox Marxist theories of history and society; nor does it so much as advert, except in this sentence, to any of the conflicts--1789, 1830, 1848--that made up the so-called "Age of Revolutions" in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe. No, the subject of the present article conveys none of the drama and grand narrative sweep associated with those ideas and events, though like them it has, in its way, organized the experience of modernity. I am referring to the revolving door, an unsung but pervasive--dare one say pivotal--technology for modern living. It has been slighted by most historians of architecture, by philosophers of the modern city, by historians of the department store, and even, bafflingly, by Gretl Hoffmann's seemingly exhaustive Doors: Excellence in International Design,not to mention Val Clery's ruminative, phenomenological essay, Doors. ¹ Yet certain artists, writers, and filmmakers were quick to discern the symbolic suggestiveness residing in, and the cultural work performed by, the revolving door. In a dazzling essay on "The Use of Analogy in Legal and Political Argument," Elaine Scarry takes the emergency hand brake found in railway passenger compartments as a "materialized locus of consent," pointing out that, since the brake is accessible to any passenger at all times and since pulling its lever actually causes the train to stop (it does not send a signal to the engineer, but directly intervenes in the vehicle's operation), it "has no equivalent within any other form of transportation." ² For me, the revolving door is just such an incomparable modern mechanism, similarly dependent upon individual participation and similarly replete with significance. Consisting typically of three or four glass panels inside a circular frame, the revolving door multiplies the possibilities of its "inherently ambiguous" plate glass by using it to reconfigure the space and experience of the threshold. ³ We are inured to the revolutionary nature of this architectural miracle, inside of which material and location, glass and threshold--each in its way "a field on which the exchange between inner and outer occurs, a field reflecting the violation of space but also enclosing and protecting"--achieve a powerful interaction through a particular distribution of space and motion inside the revolving door. ⁴ This "inside of which" calls for comment, for the revolving door is, of course, the only kind of door that is also a chamber, so that one can speak of being "inside the door." This renders it fundamentally different from the humble turnstile on which it is based.

The revolving door was the creation of one Theophilus Van Kannel (of Philadelphia), who on 7 August, 1888, received U.S. Patent number 387,571 for what he called his "New Revolving Storm Door," and who the following year was awarded the Franklin Institute's John Scott Legacy medal for useful inventions. In recommending this award, the Institute's Committee on Science and the Arts noted that "persons passing through [the new door] pass as through an ordinary turnstile," but its members recognized that, in boxing up the turnstile, Van Kannel had transformed it utterly, turning it into something like a mechanical lung for controlling the circulation of air and bodies alike. "At each one third turn of the door," they noted, "a volume of air equal to the space between two arms and from the floor to the roof of the door, is pumped out from the room to which it is attached and a similar volume of air is pumped in." ⁵ Van Kannel first began producing his new invention through the Storm-Proof Door Company of Philadelphia, and his earliest testimonials come from Philadelphia restaurants, dry goods stores, clothiers, as well as the city's Chamber of Commerce. Writing on 30 August, 1888, J. T. Harker, manager of Thackray's Restaurant...