The largest doors in the world
We at Porte Italiane love to talk about furniture, home automation and design trends. Sometimes, however, we take the time to digress a bit, and talk about curiosities related to the world of fixtures anyway. That's why today we have chosen to have fun by listing the biggest doors in the world.
Unique monuments, which demonstrate how doors have played a fundamental role in human history, both in the past and in the present. We also talked about it in an article from some time ago, entitled "7 curiosities (and some oddities) about internal doors and more".
So let's find out where the 5 most impressive gates on the planet are located.
The Gate of Magnificence of Agra, India
Universally known as the largest gate in the world, the gate of magnificence is located at Fatepuhr Sikri in northern India, about 40 km from Agra. Its original name is Buland Darwaza, while its style refers to Mughal architecture.
The numbers are impressive. Built in 601 AD by Akbar to celebrate his victory over Gujarat, it measures 40 metres. If the underlying structures are also counted, the figure rises (it must be said) up to 54 meters above ground level.
Its function? It is essentially a large door, which had the task of signaling the southern entrance to the city.
The entrance to the NASA Vehicle Assembly Building, USA
One of the tallest buildings in the world can only have a door of considerable size. This is the Vehicle Assembly Building, a facility where NASA designed space vehicles that have gone down in history, such as the Space Shuttle.
From a geographical point of view, the building covers an area that goes from the territory of Jacksonville to that of Miami, therefore on the Atlantic coast of Florida. It is the tallest single-story building in the world, standing at 160.3 meters high, 218.2 meters long and 157.9 meters wide.
There are four doors of the same size, made up of seven vertical and four horizontal panels. These entrances are to be counted among the largest gates on the whole planet, with a width of 139 meters. The opening and closing operations are completed in about 45 minutes.
The security gates of Fort Knox, USA
Fort Knox is a massive military area in Kentucky, USA. For over 60 years, it was home to US Army armored personnel carriers, now relocated to Georgia. But that's not enough, because in this same area there is the United States Bullion Depository, the deposit of the nation's gold reserves, something like 5,000 tons of gold bars.
The need to be able to count on resistant doors, therefore, is quite simple to understand. The door leading to the vault weighs around 250 tons, and opens only after entering a long code. Code which, in its entirety, is not known to anyone. Local employees have only very small fragments of the password, which must therefore be obtained from several people to be completed.
The glass doors of Antwerp, Belgium
How to make a quiet residence in Antwerp, Belgium unique? The owners of this private home must have asked themselves a similar question, which today can count on the tallest glass doors in the world. They weigh more than 4 tons, and are about six meters high. They connect two floors of the house, and technically have an opening similar to that of the windows.
The work is signed by the architects Pieter Peerlings and Silvia Mertens, who gave the name LALO to the structure.
The house now overlooks a delightful garden, and can enjoy all the natural light it needs. We also talked about the importance of this detail in the article: "Natural light in the home: benefits and how to increase it with internal doors".
The door of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA
For the last door of this review we return again to the United States, more precisely to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California. Here is the heaviest swing door in the world, which in wartime had the task of protecting the entrance to the local nuclear weapons development laboratory. Today, however, he is in charge of locking the entrance to the rooms where the STARR, a nuclear reactor designed to supply electricity, is under construction.
Again, the numbers are extraordinary. The thickness is 2.5 meters, the width equal to 3.6 meters and the weight equal to 44 thousand kilograms. However, only one person is needed to open it, given the special mechanism that allows the door to be moved easily.
The doors (of normal dimensions) proposed by Porte Italiane
This pleasant digression on the largest doors in the world underlines once again the importance that doors have in human history. For the purchase of fixtures of decidedly more normal dimensions, you can rely on Porte Italiane.
For years we have been offering a vast catalog of interior doors for the home and work environments, with hinged and folding, sliding and flush door models. For any information, please write your request using the form you find on the Contact page.
