Years ago, when I lived in one of those cold and snowy states in the Upper Midwest, I went to school in the middle of a corn (maize) field. The school had been built on land that had formerly been an old airport. The land was so flat that your dog could run away and you could still see him three days later, as one wag put it. And that was the problem: the wind swept across that land in the Winter without obstruction until it encountered the silly architectural speed-bumps there.
In my opinion, many architects are supremely impractical people, and it often strikes me that they design buildings and structures, not for people per se, but rather for some strange notion of what is aesthetically pleasing. On that corn-field campus the architects placed the parking lots 300 meters (about 1,000 feet!) from the school buildings - and if that alone wasn’t sufficient reason to strangle them for their impracticality - they also excavated the land and created sunken parking lots. Good idea, right? In the Winter, the snow settled in the parking lots and buried the automobiles there. In the Spring or Fall, heavy rain turned those parking lots into lakes. But it was all for a good cause: none could see the cars in the parking lots from the perimeter road. For some reason, it was aesthetically pleasing to a quirky cadre of architects not to see automobiles.
There were many Winter days when I trudged through the drifted snow and biting wind with a classmate or two and listened to their bitter complaints. Almost always they wanted to choke the fool who designed the campus parking lots. “No,” I told them, “Just put his office in the school building and make him walk out on this corn field every day for the next year. He’ll get the idea that aesthetically pleasing has a much lower rank than practicality.”
In my opinion, many architects are supremely impractical people, and it often strikes me that they design buildings and structures, not for people per se, but rather for some strange notion of what is aesthetically pleasing. On that corn-field campus the architects placed the parking lots 300 meters (about 1,000 feet!) from the school buildings - and if that alone wasn’t sufficient reason to strangle them for their impracticality - they also excavated the land and created sunken parking lots. Good idea, right? In the Winter, the snow settled in the parking lots and buried the automobiles there. In the Spring or Fall, heavy rain turned those parking lots into lakes. But it was all for a good cause: none could see the cars in the parking lots from the perimeter road. For some reason, it was aesthetically pleasing to a quirky cadre of architects not to see automobiles.
There were many Winter days when I trudged through the drifted snow and biting wind with a classmate or two and listened to their bitter complaints. Almost always they wanted to choke the fool who designed the campus parking lots. “No,” I told them, “Just put his office in the school building and make him walk out on this corn field every day for the next year. He’ll get the idea that aesthetically pleasing has a much lower rank than practicality.”
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