Niiiiice! You are bad though, encouraging NVIAMC ;P

I agree...love the look at this. Who needs money when you can have a hard drive full of mac's super rooms?

What is surprising? A thousand years later... and we still have doors swinging off hinges with latches and locks and handles in same time-worn positions! There are other ways to close-off an entrance (I'm partial to doors which slide into their own recesses), but the swinging door is overwhelmingly popular. Most doors are special-purpose. Irising doors or airhatch doors or rotating doors are very limited in use and take a bit of mechanical know-how to set up. Anybody can build a swinging door and hang it on hinges... although getting it hung straight is another matter. ;^) Looks good! Carolly

NVIAMC LOL, xena. I never thought of that. I'd hate to be responsible for cruelty to Gallery Viewers. 'but the swinging door is overwhelmingly popular' I guess that's because it's the easiest way to put up a door. I mean, you just hang it. All the other types need special recesses and what-not. Of course, there's always the round door. Very popular with hobbits. mac

Yeah, and Jackson's crew had the dickens of a time hinging it! Doorknobs in the exact center look pretty, but don't offer the same leverage. I like the round moon-shaped openings in Japanese homes, but they don't usually hang doors in them. Irises are about the best way to close off that sort of entrance, but then you have multiple pieces all of which must be synchronized. You are a photographer, so you've probably seen the revolving darkroom doors, mayhap with multiple exits? It is interesting walking into one and hoping that you have turned it just far enough to get where you need to go at the other side. (And hoping that the entrance is still there when you need to leave the chamber.) Carolly

Heh, heh. Carolly, my darkroom has worse things than multiple doors. If you're not careful, you might fall down the toilet when the seat's up! Or develop a bar of soap by accident. LOL. At one point, I was planning to make a futuristic house with irised doors, but I never got started on it. (It's one of those 'filed-for future-use' projects). But the idea of trying to ERC an irising diaphragm is frightening. At least I've got my nikon to use as a model for it. mac

Don't the valves in the heart work similarly? Well, since that soap may have already been rendered (pig fat and lye), I'd hate to guess what further development would do to it!

Heart valves are 2 0r 3 flaps hinged at the base and held from flapping all the way through their openings by "holdbacks" called chordae tendineae. Might make an interesting door arrangement in a semi-organic environment.

Wow... ideas are just pulsing... Can you imagine scooting the kids out of their beds and down the hall for school whether they want to go or not? Or relaxing to a nice steady shwoosh as new air washed over your face at the end of a long day? Or the horror of a leaky pipe going drip somewhere in the middle of the night? Of course, with nutrients floating by in the walls... snacking would be far too easy. ;^) Heavy flaps are typical of some primitive closures (I'm thinking of hides and tent flaps) and lighter ones in Japanese environments (the cloths that we bow under while passing through), but these are all hinged from above. Getting something to work all the way around would require serious engineering. Meanwhile, I can add this to my trap- and dungeon-building schemes... those cordae tendineae have to be connected somewhere. Carolly

"Might make an interesting door arrangement in a semi-organic environment."

Hmmm. It sounds perfect for that apartment Roger Dean built, the totally-organic one that appears in his art book, "Views."

-- Walt Sterdan, Freelance

That is the house I was thinking of. Gunnite sprayed over shaped chickenwire, IIRC. I've story-boarded dwellings for games which were similarly organic. Pity, but the more original ideas get killed.