The comments on this entry–yes, I prefer a “sewer” to an “airport,” at least when it comes to train stations–prompt me to elaborate on my comments on the Chicago public library, which was widely praised when it was built, enough so that I visited it one day when I was living there. It was stunningly difficult to get to the books–they were hidden on the fourth floor, I believe, and in some small section of low, widely-separated shelves. They didn’t understand the concept of book density–the goal of minimizing the travel time between book A and book B.
I had a similar experience yesterday when visiting my friend at MIT. He had a huge office, which at first impressed me, but then I realized that these huge offices and impressive spaces lead to one of MIT’s notorious problems: the need to take long walks through featureless corridors. I think it would be a better place with all the spaces sized down by half. That’s the Bell Labs style. Bell Labs did it right, and their choice was particularly impressive given that they had tons of extra space and tons of extra money, so they could’ve built huge offices if they’d wanted to.
I had the same impression when I was at MIT a month ago. As Christopher Alexander wrote 30 years ago, "long, sterile corridors set the scene for everything bad about modern architecture." In addition to taking forever to walk, hallways longer than 50 feet supposedly make people uncomfortable. Apparently MIT missed the memo on the pattern for short, room-like passages.
But Walking is good for health.
When I worked there, the reason Bell Labs had small offices is that Lucent charged a lab (the lowest level group with a budget) a ridiculously high amount per square foot. More than mid-town Manhattan real estate in the dot com boom, and this on a campus the size of a university in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
This led to classic funny money inefficiencies. Our lab (the multimedia lab) would periodically go bankrupt during a year due to lack of accounting skill and oversight. One year when this happened, our lab director decided "give back" half our machine room. After all, the machines didn't take up as much space as they used to. Lucent physical plant physically cut the machine room in half and put in more offices. These heated offices combined with more packing of the machines, led to a crazy balance whereby the office occupants froze and the machines overheated to the point of multiple disk failures. The machines had to be turned off until a new home for them could be found.
I am surprised why you even bother with architecture – just telecommute, e-mail, and chat online! A fat data pipe is worth 100 big long corridors…
As for libraries, ever heard of E-books? I foresee the rows of books being used for amusing random walks over information space.
I say put all the books on-line for research, and display only a random sample of the physical collection for book-sniffing breaks. The latter should change monthly and be accompanied by a free hot latte.