Tea matters (130/365)

[white_hart]

The trouble with architects is that they seem to see buildings as primarily artistic, and not functional. Which is why every time we have a meeting about our new building it ends up overrunning with lots of people asking questions such as:

Where are people supposed to make tea?

Will there be a quiet space for people to sit and eat lunch?

If the kitchen is in the open foyer area, how do we make sure that people don't take other people's food, or personal mugs, or wine that's cooling for receptions? And who is going to tidy things up when (inevitably) people don't put their cups in the dishwasher?

Yes, but really, tea is actually important, and it just feels like it's been shoved in here as an afterthought. And no, saying "but there will be a cafe in the building" doesn't help, because who wants to pay through the nose for a teabag and some indifferently hot water?

And that is why this afternoon's committee meeting overran by 45 minutes and left me incapable of spending the rest of the day doing anything other than filing my email. Which, to be fair, did need doing.

Comments

[telophase]

Architects is the reason why, in our library, the reference librarian on call sits behind a desk with a giant empty space behind them and the student asking the question sits with, essentially, a busy public hallway behind them.

It was almost worse. In one iteration of the plans, the path between the loading dock and the technical services department, which processes the incoming materials, went directly through the quiet study area.

[white_hart]

Oh, honestly. I'm fairly sure our new building will end up full of unofficial kettles in offices, and maybe even minifridges for milk.

[hilarita]

You've got to have somewhere to make tea and microwave lunch. Otherwise civilisation will come to an end. You've got to have it for all the people who can't afford cafeteria prices, and/or who have dietary requirements that are dealt with poorly by mass catering.

Initially our building didn't have a microwave, but mysteriously one snuck in there pretty soon after it opened.

Also, the design of your tea station is important. Ours has little walls round the edge, which makes it hard when lots of us descend on the kitchen at once, which happens when we have birthdays etc.

Edited to add: 1) set fire to the architect.
Or 2) chain the architect in the new building for a year. (This was my father's recommendation, and the more new buildings I encounter, the more merit this suggestion has.)

[white_hart]

This is what I keep saying. They have now conceded to an actual staffroom for professional services staff in the Divisional office area, and said there might be public-access microwaves by the cafe, but they seem dubious about microwaves in the individual department kitchens because of smells.

[nineveh_uk]

If the kitchen is in the open foyer area

Why on earth would anyone who has ever attended a school or worked in an office or met human beings think that was a good idea? Do the architects really send their secretaries out fo Costa every time they want a coffee?

[white_hart]

I can see that if you were in a trendy business's office then having the kitchen in a central space that people could wander out of their offices to might work. (There'd probably be a ping-pong table too.) But this is an academic building and it isn't going to work that way!

[perennialanna]

We have stayed open through snow, gales, global pandemic and our own domestic epidemics (chickenpox, flu and norovirus in just the two years I've been there).

The day the hot water boiler in the staffroom broke very nearly shut us...

[white_hart]

There is a reason why "the kettle is broken" is one of the items in the prioritisation exercise I use when recruiting admin assistants!

[antisoppist]

I had an American friend in Rovaniemi who lived in an Alvar Aalto designed block of flats. Beautiful. White against the snow. The huge triple-glazed windows were hinged at the top and only opened inwards so as not to spoil the smooth lines of the exterior facade. To clean them she had to get four neighbouring Mormon missionaries to come round and hold the heavy expanses of glass up for her.

There was also a rumour that he didn't put any space for cleaning equipment into Finlandia Hall and someone had to design a tasteful shed for it but I don't know if that is true.

[white_hart]

I fear that the architects are just thinking about winning prizes, and the senior people are thinking about having a stunning building that looks fantastic in publicity, and no-one is actually speaking up for the people who will have to work there. I spent the first few architect meetings last year pointing out over and over again that staff who work in the building full-time need external windows and not to be overlooking an atrium, so I suppose if I've moved on to tea it's kind of progress.

[jesuswasbatman]

I forgot which building it was, but I remember a story about one where they had to hire professional abseilers to wash the insides of the windows, because the architect failed to set up any form of access.

[sfred]

Ugh :-(

[conuly]

Oh god, architects. I got into it just this past year when I read an article about ventilation in a particular NYC public school that was built without windows. There are skylights for light. Apparently, they leak and also they don't let in enough natural light and both teachers and students have been complaining about this for decades.

And this other guy is arguing that it's not the architect's fault that the general public is just too stupid to understand his brilliant vision. Listen, if your vision doesn't involve windows then your vision is wrong!

Every variation on his argument was more inane than the last. "The building is fine, the problems are the result of deferred maintenance!" Even if that's so, I kinda think that if you're designing for the NYC government, you really need to take deferred maintenance and budget cuts into account. I've been in NYC public school buildings three times as old as this one that were still trucking along with basically duct taped floors, because they were built to higher standards. "Windows are a distraction!" Everything is a distraction if the teacher didn't write an engaging lesson plan, but if this is such a problem then I feel like window blinds are a better solution. "People are just stupid!" Yes, that was actually what he fell back on. People may be stupid, I guess, but who the hell is the building even for?

People like windows!

[serriadh]

We had the opposite problem when architects designed a building with two drama studios (for teaching students) which had floor-to-ceiling windows on at least one side. Despite the "requirements capture" specifying the need to create a black box environment, hang and test different lighting rigs, etc. etc. Natural Light Is Good For Art!! they said. It Is Creative To See Outdoors!!

[chiasmata]

Yes! We have a new building happening (allegedly), and the architects apparently have no real idea of how office buildings work. In some ways, anything would be better than the cupboard I currently work in (when it’s not a pandemic), but equally, a glass-walled stand-up meeting room and nowhere to take a private phone call? Jeez.

[lexin]

That was something else where I used to work - nowhere to take private phone calls. And most of the occupants of the building were lawyers. It just didn't work. Every time you left the office area to go to the loo, the corridors and stairwells had at least one person, sometimes more than one person, on their mobile phone.

[caulkhead]

The firm I worked for these twenty years ago moved into a brand spanking new building by an award-winning architect that was absolutely stunning to look at. The week after we moved in, the temperatures hit 38 for a solid fortnight. The exterior was mostly glass, the air conditioning had not yet been fully installed, and the architect's vision did not include blinds.

Staff who had laptops worked in the underground garage (this was 2001, it wasn't many of them). The rest of us hung bedsheets in the windows. I don't know how that accorded with his vision, but there was nothing in the contract to say we couldn't...

[white_hart]

When we had our current building refurbished, instead of the basic and functional venetian blinds the refurbished offices got nice new venetian blinds which turned out to be full of tiny perforations. Oddly enough, these proved to be absolutely useless when it came to stopping the sun shining into people's eyes or onto their computer screens, and they ended up having to fit roller blinds behind the venetian blinds...

[alithea]

I could rant for ages about the Life Sciences building they built while I was in my old job. The architects were only bothered about it looking great from the outside, those of us who had to work in it day in, day out were rather more bothered about
- no opening external windows except in the PIs offices
- air conditioning so dry we regularly got electrocuted by static
- the kitchen being in a bookable meeting room
- the additional tea making stations not being allowed kettles because they were open plan to corridors
- the toilets being individual rooms off the main thoroughfare to the stairs with no ventilation except a vent in the door on to said busy corridor
- non height adjustable desks for people who worked at computers all day

And we had to fight for months to be allowed desk chairs with proper support because some idiot decided the bog standard lab chairs were fine for folks who would be sitting on them all day.

Which is a very angry and long winded way of saying, I hear you, solidarity!

[caulkhead]

"the kitchen being in a bookable meeting room"

WTF. Admittedly, our staff lunch room is bookable as a meeting room, but not between 12 and 2, and there's also room to eat in the (separate) kitchen.

[lilliburlero]

I used to work in a classic of Bad Brutalism - I saw the plans once, and it was clear the architect had a vision of airy sunlit openness which in the real, subject-to-physics world just translated into mysterious, dank wasted space that 40 years of human, institutional use had filled with mouldering ceiling tiles, wobbly partitions and a foyer-to-common-room conversion so inept that it was heated with those wall-mounted heaters that they have in outdoor smoking areas. For all the futurism, they'd never envisaged a time when there wouldn't be a tea lady and trolley on hand to serve the staff their coffee and buns and do the washing-up afterwards...

[white_hart]

My current classic of mid-20th century architecture (as featured in Endeavour has its downsides, but generally isn't too bad apart from some of the electrics where they never imagined 21st century requirements for power sockets.

I think the architects of the new building are assuming most people will get their tea from the cafe downstairs, which suggests to me that they are all paid too much.

[serriadh]

I boggled our Estates Planning people when I said we'd need space for a larger fridge in our new kitchen/staffroom area because the University required us to make budget savings and we don't have communal milk anymore. They just could not get their head around the fact that 20+ people bringing in their own milk will take more space.

Our latest architectural brilliance is a building where the stairs aren't quite wide enough for two people to walk up comfortably. They thought this would be fine because it's a sort of airy open-plan sort of building with a central atrium (what is it with architects and atria?) and people would naturally use one staircase for going up and the other for going down. Goodness knows how it meets fire regs.

(Yes, we could run a kitty, but then we'd have people wanting to pay pro-rata for how often they're in the office and people wanting to pay the same as the dairy-milk people when they're one of a few who need almond milk etc. etc. etc. and whoever was in charge of the kitty would lose the will to live.)

[white_hart]

Even in central admin at our place, where they don't provide tea and coffee, they do provide milk because they understand the chaos that everyone bringing their own milk would cause!

Ours is also going to be an airy building with a central atrium. Apparently they're "taking inspiration from college quads"...

[mountainkiss]

I like the two ways in which the title of this post can be read.

[jinty]

Oh god yes.

My oldest friend from school is an architect (a prof of architecture & built environment in fact) and this is def a discussion I have had with her! I think she would be up for making the architect work in the building for a year afterwards but even so she has her own blind spots: I went with her to see my old college accommodation (the Florey building on St Clements, totally too warm, expanses of glass, pillars *inside* the rooms for stupid presentation reasons rather than to increase livability). Her and her architect friends swooned over it, me who had lived there hated it.

[white_hart]

Or possibly architects should have to spend a year working in a cutting-edge building as part of their training...

[sollers]

There is a story about some architects who had to design a new seminary. The plans were passed to the Pope for approval and came back with the annotation “Suntne angeli?”*

After some puzzlement they realised what the problem was. They hadn’t allowed for any toilets.

*”Are they angels?”

[white_hart]

We do have toilets, at least, though my department keep expressing bafflement that the plans include lots of gendered toilets and not just single-occupancy unisex ones.

[maia]

But it's so much more fun for architects to design buildings that are Conceptually Cool rather than buildings that meet the actual human needs of the actual human beings who will spend their actual days in them! /sarcasm

[white_hart]

I wonder what the architects' actual offices are like!

[swingandswirl]

Uuuugh. Architects need to be made to spend a year in horribly designed buildings before being inflicted upon the world.

Fingers crossed your efforts to bring some common sense to the discussion go well. /sends tea and hugs/