Portals
PORTALS. A portal is any gateway or doorway, insofar as it elicits ritual actions or becomes a locus of concentrated architectural symbolism. It is a space framed to call attention to spatial transition; thus it has characteristics of both a path and a place. Because a portal often separates a sacred precinct from a profane one, or a regulated from an unregulated zone, it is both a termination and a beginning. As a structure that is both inside and outside the same zone, and one that attracts dangerous as well as beneficent forces, it is a site of considerable ambivalence.
The most rudimentary forms of a portal are the cave entrance, the stone heap, the upright post, and two uprights supporting a lintel. More elaborate ones add not only familiar features such as a threshold, doors, knobs, and hinges, but also figures, inscriptions, porches, domical towers, cupolas, niches for statues, and crowning arcades. In some eras portals have been so emphasized as to become freestanding monuments separated from buildings, bridges, or city walls. No longer only markers of paths, they become places in their own right. Three famous examples are the Great Gateway (1630–1653 CE) at the Taj Mahal in India, the bailou ("entrance") leading to the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha (eighteenth century) near Beijing, and the Gates of Paradise (1403–1424 CE), designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti for the Florence Baptistry (c.
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