The floor of each office is made horizontal, so that your chair does not roll down and hit the separation. But if you take your chair in the corridor, be careful not to let go of it. All things rolling naturally find their way to the lost+found in the lobby.Also, regarding elevators:
...[F]or long distances, we have to allow some kind of space-warp, in the form of express elevators, in transparent shafts inside the hollow patio of the tower. Note that only express elevators are needed, stopping only every 1,800 degrees (or equivalently every five turns or every kilometer). All smaller distances can be walked with the belt.Pretty cool!
Imagine coming into work one morning to find a raft of bowling balls rushing down the second story corridor at you. I honestly don’t know what I would do.posted by LordSludge at 5:05 PM on May 21, 2007
Imagine coming into work one morning to find a raft of bowling balls rushing down the second story corridor at you. I honestly don’t know what I would do.My number one fear, even while out on the sidewalk. Some days it's enough to keep me from going outside.
We can take advantage of the double-helix shape to have a single corridor in which both ends are connected. By having two intertwined helices and connecting their top- and bottom-ends, you can have a closed 1-D topology, just like a circle or an indicar ring. Nobody will work in an office near an ‘end’ of the building. The map of the building can be drawn as a circle, with elevators drawn as spokes, and if you turn the map, everyone’s office will be in the ‘middle’.The comments below the article are pretty good, addressing problems such as HVAC, fire safety, and the fact that it's been done before to poor effect:
Steve Fishboy May 21st, 2007 1:11 pmposted by LordSludge at 8:06 AM on May 22, 2007
This idea has been used for perhaps 30 years in Chile, though on a smaller scale.
The buildings in question are known as “caracoles” or “snails”. They’re typically 5-7 stories high. They were built to serve as something like malls, before malls made it into the country.
Once malls made it big, these spiral buildings became perhaps the least desirable commercial space outside of slums. Some of the problems:
- Foot traffic decreases the higher up you go. Drastically. And this is in spite of the fact that there are stairwells and sometimes elevators or escalators to speed the trip. Not having these would be suicidal.
- A tremendous amount of space is wasted in the center of the structure. And for some reason, no one has thought of building cross bridges every couple of floors. Perhaps just to save money.
- When there are a fair number of people walking about, walking becomes more like a slow shuffling.
These caracoles now tend to be mixed use, with stores on the first level or two and small offices from there on up — accountants, hair dressers, etc. They’re very low prestige, but more affordable than the alternatives.
The idea seems neat in theory, but in practice it’s a strip mall with crooked walking surfaces. Without the advantages of a strip mall, like parking right outside the store you want to go to. And the advantages to be had from building vertically are essentially the same as those enjoyed by traditional multi-story buildings.
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posted by xod at 2:36 PM on May 21, 2007