What is a portal: in architecture and not only

If you briefly answer the question about what a portal is, you can say that it is nothing more than an appropriately designed entrance to a certain room. But this element of architectural design is very important. In addition to the function of the input, it carries on itself a certain semantic load. Its key significance lies in the fact that the first judgment about the entire building is rendered on it.

Portal in architecture

The design of the entrance opening is organically connected with the architectural stylistics of different eras. This is well traced even with a cursory examination of the architectural monuments of antiquity and the Middle Ages that have survived to the present day. From the fortress gates to the entrances to the cult and administrative buildings. The indelible seal of times lies on everything. Particularly expressive design of portals reaches in the Middle Ages, in the Catholic cathedrals of Italy, Spain, France and Germany. In order to understand what a portal is, it is enough to visit the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, where architectural fragments of portals of different eras and stylistics are represented in abundance. And an attentive spectator such a trip to the museum can give a lot. In addition to general aesthetic education, it is possible to find absolutely practical architectural solutions when it becomes necessary to build a niche under the fireplace or to enter the country house in a non-standard way.

How to build a portal?

Such a question periodically arises before the owners of suburban real estate. And solving it, it is necessary to achieve an organic combination of functional purpose and visual expressiveness of the entrance to the house. To start, the opening must have sufficient geometry for unobstructed placement in the house of the necessary structures and cumbersome interior items. Mandatory calculation of the power structures of the ceiling must be carried out. And it must be produced by qualified specialists.

It is best to contact the designer-architect who will have to take into account the customer's wishes in the stylistic decision of the entrance portal and offer him a choice of several possible options. Choose the optimal one. In country houses, portals made of natural stone in combination with door constructions made of valuable wood look equally good. Very impressive look forged metal trim elements.

Other portals

The concept of the portal goes far beyond the boundaries of architecture. This is a general technical term, denoting an opening in the structure for placing an assembly or assembly. But much more often this word is used in a figurative sense. What is a portal, how not to enter? Entrance to other spaces, worlds, measurements and imagery systems. The concept of the portal is widely used in science fiction and fantasy literature, as well as in the corresponding cinematography.
And there is no need to explain what a portal is to a broad mass of users of the World Wide Web. The portal for them is nothing more than accessing the Internet through this or that resource.