THINKING ABOUT DOORS

There is a door that I made(some months ago) for the Banking Halls.  The middle, opening part is taken from photographs of doors that exist today in the Bank Museum (the reconstructed Stock Office).  The surround is based on a drawing of Soane’s and a 1920s photograph of the Colonial Office.  I had made the surround rather crudely, and the whole thing was a fixed size with no built-in modularity.  So I decided to make this slightly more robust and parametric, then go on to build more doors with interchangeable components to allow for more variety and flexibility.

A fully parametric version would be quite demanding, but making parametric moulding profiles for the segmental pediment is perfectly doable. It all comes down to Height and Depth, with 3 intermediate parameters (X,Y,Z) that are all expressed as fractions of “Height”.  In other words, increasing Height will scale the whole profile up, while Depth can be varied independently.  The ogee curve is a polyline, locked to the…