Doorknob

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

In Doorknob, architecture and design scholar Thomas Mical explores a commonplace device that under closer scrutiny becomes a wonderful and slightly surreal mechanism of transformation. Inviting readers to look again at this everyday object, Mical shows how the doorknob can be understood as thing, as process, as transitional object, as the machine of arrival and escape, drawing upon examples from design, life, art, and mechanics.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.