Enceintes
The Baffled Entrance
Enceintes, defined as the barriers which prevent access to and, almost always, obscure vision of a particular location such as towns, settlements and fortresses, consist of raw or daubed wooden palisades, earthen banks (ramparts), and walls of rammed earth, adobe, baked bricks, and natural or shaped stone. Military functional gate features and bastions are all distinguished by their being part of enceintes.
The basic principle of their design was to subject the enemy to fire from as many directions as possible but especially against the unshielded right side and over as long a distance as possible. Like ditches, ramparts, palisades, and walls, defended gates provide defenders with protection, height, and a ‘screen of manoeuvre.’ Part of three of the main types of defended gates (baffled, screened, and flanked) the most successful and relevant of these to my own work is the baffled.
Baffled gates are one of the most ancient and long-used type of defended gate. They also are referred to as lateral, bent axis, offset, staggered, crab-claw, serpentine, and labyrinthine gates. The simplest form of such gates are overlapped curtain defenses such as ditches, ramparts and palisades to form an indirect and flanked entrance passage.
The more complicated forms extended the curtain wall either outward or inward where the curtain turned parallel with the enceinte such as bent axis entrances. The twice-bent extensions of the curtains were called clavicula by the Romans, who used them extensively in their fortifications, even at their most temporary camps.
The diagrams to the right of baffled entryways reveal the various techniques used to at points of entry, which could be employed in my design to elongate thresholds between spaces and allow visitors to discover the building through revealing views and hidden rooms behind corners.
In other countries such as India, the ancient protective enceintes techniques have been recently revived to comply with regulations.
In coherence with the new regulation that drinking establishments must be ‘at least 500m away from state and national highways’ a bar in India employed these techniques to create a mazed walkway, extending the threshold between the bar and the highway.
The employees of Aiswarya Bar, located 150 meters from Highway 17 in Kerala, began to build a small maze out of prefabricated concrete walls leading from the entrance to the building to the street. The 350m walkway to the entrance, theoretically makes it more than 500m away from the highway, from road to the barstool.
According to the local excise commissioner, the measurement is not of the aerial distance but only the walking distance, which therefore renders the multiplication of space a valid way to meet the letter of the law. Two objects standing side by side could, legally speaking, be miles apart.
On BLDGBLOG, the scheme is described as ‘the architecture of compression and delay: a hundred feet hidden in ten, a short walk transformed into a labyrinth of approach and misdirection’. I feel as though this could be a very relevant approach to the extension of walkways between spaces in my own floor plans. The extension of these interstitial spaces will be a continuation of my studies into thresholds of religious buildings, whilst building tension and surprise in my own scheme.
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