Doors at Dougherty are a design disaster. They certainly are a staple of engineering, but in many cases, they should be scrapped entirely.
The double doors that front the classroom buildings are so uninviting that you can’t even tell if they’re firmly locked. Same story with the front gates: everyone knows the feeling of deflation as you frantically tug on all six sets of handles only to find that not a single one is open. Why isn’t there just a single large gate open when students come to class and shut outside school hours? Locked doors serve no purpose but to crush hopes and stub toes – if you’re lucky enough to leave with minor injuries. You can’t even blame the person behind that wildly swinging door: they’re so heavily tinted that if you used them as sunglasses, you’d be legally blind.
Elsewhere, doors find use as weaponry. They’re meant to be violently slammed during an argument, which, as you surely know, does nothing to help. By creating a border, they make it tough for angry folks to reconcile their differences, and that’s the last thing we want in our harmonious society. More subtly, doors inspire chivalry – a danger to feminism.
But besides design, the double doors are doubly poor in placement. They’re just bad at moving people in and out of a building. It doesn’t help that most of these doors are placed right in front of a stairway. The geometry doesn’t work out. Just think about these paths: one person is exiting the stairs and entering the downstairs hallway, one enters from outside the building to climb up the stairs, one is pushing through opposite-moving traffic at the left door, one is lost and forgot his next class and another is playing in the doorway. There’s a lot of intersecting lines here, and every one means a collision. And, let’s be honest: your primitive monkey brain prefers the nearest door instead of walking an extra meter to the correct entrance.
The solution? Remove doors. In terms of people-flow, they’ll never be as good as just an empty opening. In fact, there is no use for these double-doors anyway; Dougherty should have been laid out more intelligently, with classroom doors facing the outside wall of the building, like with the portable classrooms in the 9000’s section. That way, there’d be much more space outside for students to navigate, instead of one area for them to accumulate. Or, if overcrowding was actually the intention, why not just replace doors with a wall? I’ve never been assaulted by a swinging wall.
I’ll admit that classroom doors themselves are necessary. However, they’re meant to function as a substitute for a wall, a concept that almost every teacher seems to be missing: keep them closed and locked at all times! It’s extra economical: the classroom’s air conditioning can work less hard. In other words, replace the door with a wall. The late stragglers and bathroom-pass abusers don’t deserve to be in class anyway.
These double doors simply mean trouble. They are an unfortunate area (besides humanities) where our shiny modern school rusts. Their universality is just an indication that nobody questions them.
And hallways? Don’t even get me started on them.
