The doors of this world are also beating records! The individual doors proudly present themselves in their best disciplines. Which door is the highest, heaviest, oldest, most beautiful or hardest to reach? You can find out this and other background stories in this article.
She's aiming high!
When it comes to size, the winner is crystal clear: at around 139 metres, the tallest door in the world is located in NASA 's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in the USA. This makes the door just 21 metres smaller than the building itself. When it was completed in 1965, the VAB was even considered the tallest building in the world. The entire structure was built for the Saturn V moon rocket. It is the largest, tallest, heaviest and most efficient machine ever created by human hands. At the time, there were fears that the rocket could break when it was raised. The VAB made it possible to build it vertically. From there, it travelled through the highest door in the world directly to its launch position.
Take out the magnifying glass
From the biggest to the smallest door in the world! In 2018, French researchers from the Femto-ST Institute decided to build the smallest house in the world using a micro-robot. The result: a two-storey house that is just 0.015 millimetres high, 0.02 millimetres wide and 0.01 millimetres long. The walls made of silicone membrane are just 0.0012 millimetres thick. If you consider that an entrance door is about a quarter of the height of a two-storey house, the entrance door of the micro-house is only 0.00375 millimetres thick. Hard to imagine, isn't it?
Nobody can get past her
Let's move on to the heavyweights! Of all the registered doors in the world, the vault doors of the American Fort Knox gold storage facility are unbeatable in terms of weight. They are 53 centimetres thick and weigh an impressive 22,000 kilograms. This makes the doors about as heavy as 550 children, 44 horses or 3.5 elephants.
Logically, the safe does not open by hand, but by a special mechanism. This requires a combination of numbers that no single person knows completely. If the golden halls are to open, various employees have to enter their individual codes independently of each other.
To be on the safe side, the site is secured with a minefield, barbed wire, thousands of soldiers and police officers. And if someone does manage to sneak in, the thieves can expect poisonous gas or flooding in the vaults. That really is bomb-proof!
Quite an old vintage
Age before beauty? - We stick to the proverb and come to the oldest door in the world. To do so, we are travelling to ancient Rome. In the Basilica of Santa Sabina, there are cypress wood doors that were made around 430 AD. The double doors at the main entrance have 18 relief images depicting scenes from the Old and New Testaments.
There are even older doors, but they are all no longer in use: during an excavation of a pile-dwelling settlement in Switzerland, a real wooden door was discovered whose date of manufacture was dated to 3063 BC. In fact, it is a door from the Stone Age. The fact that the wooden door has been so well preserved in Switzerland is due to the special soil chemistry in the Alpine region. Plant materials are better preserved in this soil than in other regions.
The dazzling beauty
Of course, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder. However, if many art experts are to be believed, the case is clear: the Gates of Paradise of the Baptistery of Florence Cathedral are the most beautiful doors in the world. Lorenzo Ghiberti was commissioned to build this portal in 1425. The doors are made of bronze and are gilded. They show ten reliefs with scenes from the Old Testament, such as the sacrifice of Isaac.
Today, only a copy can be seen at the baptistery. The originals were removed by the National Socialists during the Second World War, supposedly to protect them from bombing raids. Fortunately, they were salvaged from a railway tunnel after the Second World War. Today, the Gates of Paradise are safe in the Cathedral Museum in Florence.
The door to the universe
The last door is virtually out of this world: the airlock door of the ISS space station is the hardest door to reach. It is located around 400 kilometres from Earth and moves at a speed of 7.66 km/s. The ISS has been orbiting the Earth since 1998 and, according to NASA, it has hosted around 150 visitors to date. Seven of these were tourists. The first purely private flight is scheduled for 2022. The cost? - A whopping 45 million euros!
Record-breaking doors for everyday use
Even if everyday doors do not immediately lead into outer space or are secured with 22 tonnes - there is no need to hide their impressive effect and high quality. The Arbonia Group offers a wide variety of door solutions for modern living concepts that combine design and function.
COMO door design by GARANT
Double frame panel with glass opening - ideal for corridors with daylight requirements. Inspired by the traditional light openings of Greek doors.
