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.

[hilarita]

If they're dubious because of smells, then it suggests the ventilation isn't good enough. And we're just living through an object lesson in the importance of ventilation.
Just because architects are all rich enough to eat out for lunch.

[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 think part of the problem is with the kitchen being located in the open foyer area, with offices and teaching rooms opening off it, rather than being in its own room, but that was also the architects' idea...

[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!

[nineveh_uk]

Come to think of it, that's how it worked in the Robert Hooke building and it was fine, but it was a smaller building and specific space, so when you wandered out to the pigeon holes and to the kitchen or the loo, you met people you knew to chat to, not random members of the public.

[white_hart]

Yes, I think it's different in what is basically an office environment rather than one that has teaching rooms and students wandering in and out.

[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.

[perennialanna]

Especially as, for obvious reasons, we can't have surreptitious kettles anywhere else! Only office staff are allowed mugs without lids.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[conuly]

WHY DO ARCHITECTS HATE WINDOWS SERIOUSLY.

[lexin]

That is very likely.

The building I used to work in (Petty France, in London) had an electricity supply that was said to trip if too many people boiled a kettle or ran a fan at the same time. So they banned kettles and fans on desks, and wondered why we were pissed off and hot.

They did provide kitchens, but they were always one kitchen for 75 staff, and so were busy and mucky. And only one person among the 75 staff took the trouble to find out how the dishwasher worked.

[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.

[hilarita]

Yes. Our open plan kitchen space works, but then we don't have large teaching rooms (only stuff for small-group teaching), the building isn't really open to the general public, and the kitchen area is also upstairs. But that's because most of our teaching happens on the other side of the road.

[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...

[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.

[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!