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

[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.

[perennialanna]

My house was last rewired in 2005 and the electrician clearly didn't anticipate 2020s socket requirements...