A hundred years ago in Russia, the front porches in city houses were boarded up and people began to enter the houses through the “black” entrances, which were previously used by the servants. At the same time, private ownership of land was also abolished, due to which a piece of land, not enclosed by walls of houses and fences, became a unit of urban territory - land ownership, home ownership or a parcel, but the territory located between the streets - a quarter. With the appearance in the middle of the century of a new unit of division of the city - a microdistrict, a unit not so much spatial as social, the quarter also disappeared, replaced either by an inter-highway territory, or by something else.
One of the consequences of these innovations was the disappearance of the traditional street as an extended urban space, built up with houses with understandable entrances, both to the house itself and to the inner courtyard space.
Another part of the socialist heritage is that the distinction between private and general has disappeared and, accordingly, the need to clearly separate one from the other with gates, architecturally designed entrances, portals, and arches has disappeared. If where the gates have survived, they acquired a purely utilitarian meaning, representing an entrance to closed, regime institutions (prison, zone, NKVD, Regional Committee, and so on).
And now the functions of protection and protection of territories are mainly electronic means: cameras, alarms, and various cunning devices from unauthorized entry - gadgets and barriers.
As a result, the theme of entrance practically disappeared from the arsenal of architectural themes as an accentuation of the moment of transition from one space to another, from one environment to another, from public to private, from ordinary, everyday to solemn, festive, from freedom to rigor, from free to limited.
Maybe we miss this now?
But now we have another mutation in our brains and, accordingly, in our lifestyles, and therefore we decided all that urban space that we inherited from socialism, in principle, by definition, indivisible, nevertheless redistribute fences and barriers - and as a result we got a monstrous chaos, in which it is impossible to navigate otherwise than by the navigator.
You can't really attach an entrance to today's houses either - they are now, as a rule (with the exception of the towers), multi-sectional with separate entrances, none of which is more important than the rest. And in general, now we go to our entrance to the house not along the street with its sidewalks, but some tricky paths, paths, passages, holes. And we drive up even weirder about, but have long ceased to be surprised at this, thinking that it should be so.
But the real problems begin when we try to explain to someone how to get to our house and how to find the entrance to it. There are already traditional architectural visual landmarks - expressive details, bay windows and the like, do not work, you need some other navigation system - digital, or something like that.
It seems that earlier in this regard, life was clearer and easier.
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For example, a wall, an archway in the wall. Since the wall surrounds the sanctuary, everyone understands that this arch is the entrance for God - it is visible in the opening.
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But the entrance is in the form of a gate, and there is no wall, or rather it is, but it is not even a wall, but a wall through which a child will not find it difficult to climb, but the gate itself is the personification of nobility and dignity. Obviously, they are more important than the wall, they are the culmination point of the landscape and they are not so much functional as they are symbolic.
It can be seen that people here had a high opinion of themselves and it seems that they did not argue with them about this, otherwise nothing would have been left of this gate long ago.
It was a sign denoting an intersection, a transition from one state to another. The moment of crossing was important, great importance was attached to it, and such a luxurious gate made the crossing even more tangible.
In our today's everyday culture, such movements-transitions are not so important and noticeable, but these moments are still significant in Anglo-Saxon political culture, where they always talk about someone crossing a certain "red line", meaning the very symbolic "irresistible" the line that Tom Sawyer drew on the ground with his bare toe when he met Huckleberry Finn (which, as you remember, he immediately crossed).
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And this is not so much an entrance, but just an architectural detail: the gate is an arch, stylized as some kind of antiques, somewhere in the center of London, not very convincing from a purely architectural point of view, but certainly raising the status of the lane into which one of the walls goes expensive hotel.
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And these heroic houses with giant arches are our 20-30s of the last century: the complex of buildings of the Gosprom in Kharkov by architect S. S. Serafimov and the ZIS house on Velozavodskaya street in Moscow by architect I. F. Milinis.
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zooming 1/3 S. S. Serafimov. Gosprom building in Kharkov, 1925-1928
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zooming 2/3 I. F. Milinis. Residential building ZIS on Velozavodskaya street, 1936-1937
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Image 
zooming 3/3 I. F. Milinis. Residential building ZIS on Velozavodskaya street, 1936-1937
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At the same time, the competitive design of the building of N. K. T. P. architects Vesnins on Red Square in Moscow.
One of the favorite architectural themes of that glorious, in terms of architecture, time is the incredible size of the arches, the openings in the buildings - breathtaking, absorbing air, light, and the surrounding space.
But these super-arches were certainly no longer utilitarian entrances to buildings. These were rather architectural gestures, signs, symbols of entry not into a particular residential building or the People's Commissariat, but into some bright Future, into a new life, into something exciting and beautiful.
Those times are long gone, but arches or, more precisely, hypertrophied openings, niches, or even just holes in buildings that are not due to utilitarian needs, are still found, and there are completely different reasons for their appearance.
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Here is a recently built residential building on the embankment of the Moskva River, where a huge 4-storey arch of a 5-storey building, although it coincides with the entrance to this symmetrical building, has such expressive dimensions and shape not for its sake, but rather striving to play a certain important compositional role in a row of structures that form this fragment of the embankment. The fact is that this house occupies a historically important and significant place where the church building once stood, which was undoubtedly the dominant feature of this area.
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The residential building, originally designed as two independent asymmetric buildings and later, towards the end of the design, “decided” to become a giant arch, thanks to the penthouse connecting them on the upper level.
Even later, it was “discovered” that this arch was happily on a previously unreadable axis of a Catholic cathedral located on a completely different street, which was later “aggravated” by the authors who placed two more new buildings around this axis.
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Residential building in Odintsovo. This is a good example of the complete discrepancy between the expressive, huge arches at the corner of this monstrous (due to its excessive size) house and the real entrances to the inner space of a huge courtyard located in completely different places.
The architects could not fail to highlight the important corner of this house, with which he meets those who drive along the main street into this part of the city. Two arches and a red ten-story volume located between them create the accent they need, in their opinion.
And, besides, unloading, “saving” this difficult corner, from the side of the yard they open gaps to the street, thereby including the space of the yard into city life.
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House with a hole
"Where there is no vessel, and there is its meaning" - something like this said the Chinese sage Lao Tzu about objects that include and contain emptiness.
A dwelling house, of course, is difficult to call a vessel, but in this case I would like to think that emptiness, or, as it were, a part taken out of it, is not a loss or a defect, but, rather, really becomes a kind of dignity, a characteristic feature, a feature. In addition, following the eastern wisdom, as in the previous example with torn corners, we promote better circulation of life-giving energies, avoid stagnation and all other negative conditions.
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“A window to old Moscow” - this is what the drivers of excursions to Moscow sights used to say to their wards, leading them to this square window on the terrace in front of a modern office building and showing the green courtyard in front of the Old Believer Church in Turchaninov Lane and the two-story wooden clergy house.
The buildings that appeared later ruined this idyllic view, which justified the violation of the historical building rules - a window to the neighboring property. No one, of course, will close up the opening because of this, because an unspoiled view of the Church of the Intercession is still preserved, and for neighbors such a large opening is still better than a blank wall.
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Obviously, all of these listed arches, holes, openings, voids inside buildings, which at first glance do not give anything except the loss of useful commercial volume, there are, nevertheless, many different other meanings and explanations, since they somehow happened … Some of them are quite rational and demonstrate at least the convincingness of architects who managed to prove to their customers the usefulness of such non-utilitarian gestures.
But, if we discard the professionally architectural motivation (composition, environment, scale, etc.), then perhaps in all this we can assume a subconsciously necessary “sacrifice” that a new object, building, house brings to local “gods” - genius loci - with that, in order to be accepted, successfully integrated into an already existing, established society.
This taken out, subtracted part of the volume of the building, the vessel not filled "to the stop" is nothing more than a payment to the city for the invasion, a kind of apology …
This is roughly what we do, splashing some wine on the ground before drinking it in a new place for us, trying to appease the local spirits.
But gates, arches are not always something pretentious and positive, not always an entrance to something or to where we are promised pleasant surprises. An architecturally or otherwise decorated gate or arch can also denote an exodus, that is, an exit from the human world into another reality, such as the infamous metal arch with the inscription "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" above the gate of Auschwitz, through which thousands of prisoners passed.
Or the allegorical, but in fact, photographically reliable gates of "Matrosskaya Tishina" in the painting of the same name by the artist-architect S. A. Sharova, where exactly such Exodus some kind of motley, daring procession through the arch, into which they do not really pass, leading them somewhere into the icy desert, the only decoration of which is a lone watchtower.
But, in the end, an arch or other opening is emptiness, and we, kind of like, are building material, dense entities - houses, square meters that are sold and bought, and it is they that have commercial value, thanks to which the labor of builders, designers and everyone else associated with the construction business is paid.
Voids (arches, openings, etc.) increase the cubic capacity of the object (and even then it depends on how you count), but not its income component.
Life has become simpler and more dynamic, there is no longer a place and time for various ceremonies, for which a place and time is now allotted at all kinds of official and ritual actions: receptions, celebrations, holidays, funerals, etc.
The rest of real, everyday life is becoming simpler and simpler - "without ceremony" and the trend is unambiguously directed towards further simplification, relief, liberation from all archaic conventions. And replacing them with more relevant "concepts" that are unlikely to be translated into the traditional architectural language, but who knows, maybe they will lead us to some kind of new architecture.
