The Handle: An Inquiry

The door handle is the point at which a human body and a building meet. You cannot enter or leave a room with a door without using a handle. F. Cantilever became interested in handles in 2015 when he reached for one in a building he was visiting and understood, for the first time, that someone had designed exactly this gesture.

The book covers handles from every angle: ergonomics, material, the history of the grip, the question of which hand is assumed (handles have handedness, Cantilever argues, even when this is not explicit), the ADA and its relationship to handle design, and a final chapter on handles that are difficult to use and what this says about the relationship between a building and its inhabitants.

The chapter on difficult handles is fourteen pages. It is illustrated with photographs. Cantilever took all of them himself, having carried a camera for two years specifically for this purpose.

'Every handle,' Cantilever writes, 'is a small theory of the human hand. Most of them are wrong. The ones that are right are indistinguishable from the ones that are correct by accident, which is its own philosophical problem.'