Moving through
Corridor
housingschoolhospitalofficehotel
A long, narrow space that connects several rooms without having to pass through them.
What it solves
It gives each room privacy and organizes movement within the building. In the tropics it can also work as a cross-ventilation channel if its ends open to the outside.
Today
A good corridor is short, receives daylight at some point and is wide enough for a wheelchair and for evacuation in case of fire. It is best to open it to courtyards or windows so it also ventilates.
Common mistake
Designing long, dark, blind corridors that only consume floor area and trap heat.
Tomorrow
With more older people in residential buildings, the corridor calls for generous widths, level floors and places to rest. A corridor with a window and a bench also invites people to meet.
Fact In United States housing the minimum corridor width is 91 centimeters. In new hospital corridors it rises to 2.4 meters clear.
Where it comes from
- 1English noble houses England, 1597
John Thorpe is the first recorded architect to replace chains of connected rooms with a corridor with a door for each room. - 2Victorian house United Kingdom, 19th century
The corridor separates the routes of the family from those of the servants. - 3Imperial gardens of the Qing dynasty Beijing, China, 1750, rebuilt in 1886
The 728-meter Long Corridor of the Summer Palace made it possible to walk through the garden protected from the weather.
Masters
- Geoffrey Bawa University of Ruhuna, Matara, Sri Lanka, 1988
He links the campus pavilions with roofed corridors that pass between landscaped courtyards. He shows that in the tropics a corridor can be open and cool and serve to look at the landscape.
Appears in the routes
See also
Also in Moving through
Diagrams and texts by LDB Arquitectura. They are shared under the CC BY 4.0 license, which allows them to be used and adapted with credit to the source.