We’ve got threads about stupid product design and stupid software design. There’s gotta be a lot of bad building design out there. Any good stories?
When designing a building, please try to not make it a swastika. Thank you.
My mom used to live in an apartment that was a renovated schoolhouse. Her apartment had a couple of flaws. One, the hallway was pretty narrow, yet long, so it took up a lot of the apartment. My mom couldn’t resist the temptation to put knickknacks there because why not use the space? But then, it was so narrow that I instinctively shuffled along it instead of a normal gait with swinging arms for fear of hitting the sides.
And the bathroom was not wide enough for both the toilet and the bathtub. The toilet faced the bathtub, and there was not enough space to put your legs in a normal sitting position. You had to spread your legs wide and in order for me to actually defecate, I had to then narrow them to the point where my ankles hurt from pushing the bathtub. Sometimes I needed a break from that position and put my legs over the bathtub side and into the tub itself, and I was still in no danger of slipping off the toilet.
Bored Panda has a number of these.
My stepson lived in an apartment one year where the front door opened into a narrow hallway about eight feet long and ended in a T. We tried to move a couch in and probably spent an hour or more trying to twist and turn it to get to go around the T and into the living room. (When they moved out, they just tossed the couch off the balcony rather than try to get it back out the front door.)
My sister lives in a bog-standard apartment complex, 8 units per building, 4 on each floor. Half face one direction, half the other, with a long outdoor hallway between them (except for the roof, they’d be separate buildings).
Each unit has one large window facing into the yard, and one large window facing into the long hallway separating the two halves. This window is mostly in the dark, and faces only the wooden siding of the opposite building half (hope this make sense). There’s literally nothing to see, no light, and it doesn’t allow a view of who’s at your door. These are installed upstairs and down, so it doesn’t seem to be fire code related. Apparently every apartment in the complex is that way, but it makes no sense to me. Why not add a window to the front side where it gets light?
Maybe stupid is too strong, but it’s definitely bewildering to me.
When looking to buy a home ages ago we ran across quite a few poorly thought out renovations people did. One older home that was originally built without a garage had a front and back door and on the side of the house an exterior stairwell that went down to an entry into the basement. They decided to build an attached garage on that side of the house over that stairwell. So if you pulled into the garage with a load of groceries and wanted to get them to the kitchen you’d have to take them down the stairwell, into the basement, then back up the interior stairs to the main level.
Used to be an Eye Hospital where I lived that had carpets And floor Tile that worked like an optical illusion for some folks. You could see patients (and staff!) hesitate at stairways, going from a room into a hallway,etc. It always seemed like a cruel joke
Had a friend growing up where for some reason the second floor apparently didn’t have any ceiling, you looked straight up and could see the attic insulation. Also as a result all rooms on the second floor weren’t sealed off from one another as the wall stopped at a point and you could then throw a ball over it from room to room if you wanted. Apparently the house was built like that for some reason, made it more “rustic”.
My workplace consistently had a problem numbering room.
Normally, rooms are numbered with odd numbers on one side of the hall, and even numbers on the other side. Room 201 and 202 are roughly opposite each other.
In one building, Numbers ran consecutively along one side of the hall, then back the other way. So room 201 was opposite room 244.
Another floor would skip room numbers and you’d find them out of order further down the hall.
Then there was the Escher Hilton in Rye Brook, NY, home of Lunacon for many years. There were two wings with a connecting hallway. One end of the hall was the 4th floor and the other end was on the 7th floor, since the bottom floor of that wing was the 5th floor.
(There actually was a reason for it – each floor of the larger wing had 100 room numbers; when the added the second wing, they didn’t want to go to four-digit room numbers).
For my college reunion I just stayed at an expense Marriott in Kendall Square in Cambridge.
Poor design #1 - though the room was not a corner room, they made the window glass a corner, no doubt to look cool from the outside. But the curtains did not meet quite well enough to cover the point of the triangle formed by the glass, so the sun shone in early in the morning.
Poor design #2. To save space, no doubt, the door to the closet was the same as the door to the bathroom. Close the closet and the bathroom is exposed. Close the bathroom door and the closet is exposed. Try to get into the closet when someone is in the bathroom and you lock them out. Plus, the door was heavy and noisy. We could hear the doors closing in other people’s rooms.
It reminded me of the desk scenes in Brazil.
The Humanities Building at UW-Madison. Not every elevator went to every floor. Even if it did, you couldn’t necessarily get to a specific area.
I had to drop off a paper once for a professor in the African Studies Department. It was on the third floor. I took an elevator to the third floor. I wandered until I found the African Studies Department…on the other side of a locked door. I had to go back down and try a different elevator.
Plus for that class we had to move classrooms because you couldn’t block the ceiling skylight and thus we couldn’t see the slides.
I stayed at a fairly new Hilton hotel a couple of months ago in which the same thing happened; there was a barn door on a track that could hide either the bathroom or the closet but not both at the same time.
When we opened a brand new hospital back in the 90s. the pharmacy, where they stored all the strong drugs, was built more or less like that.
The ceiling was the standard office-type suspended tiles and the wall between the pharmacy and the main corridor only went up as far as the tiles.
When we were house-hunting some years back, we looked at one split-foyer home that had a really steep flight of stairs going up. For whatever reason, the main bedroom on the second floor took up more than half of the depth of the house, making the 2 front bedrooms very small and putting the hallway off-center, resulting in the steep stairs. I’m guessing whoever built the house wanted a really big bedroom, but the asymmetry was disturbing.
The Engineering Building at UCLA was built on a hill and combined two buildings, and depending on the entrance you took, you’d be on a different floor with each door. I remember I had a class there, and I entered the building on the fifth floor.
BTW, it wasn’t an engineering class. It was a German class IIRC, but I had a friend who said the engineering students had a coffee room with surprisingly good coffee. She said it was close to where my classroom was, but she couldn’t give me exact directions. My first morning I got to class early and followed the coffee drips in the hall way to a stair where I continued to follow the drips and found the coffee room super quickly.
Reminds me of the DoubleTree in Breckenridge CO. While very well-situated for me - it is across the street from a hiking trail - you have to take two elevators to get to the top floors because it was built on a hill with the higher floors not completely overlapping the previous floors. Thankfully, when I come it is during summer and I will not have to haul all my skiing gear through two elevators - I swear this was a plan to rent more of their ski lockers.
But the rooms themselves are great. It had the single best hotel room I’ve stayed in, the size of a large kitchenette room, with both a large dining room table and a good TV table.
Interesting. I wonder if this design was in some architectural digest.
However, it would be interesting to set a bedroom farce, where someone always hides in the closet, in such a room.
Woman, to unexpectedly early husband: “No, you can’t go to the bathroom. There is a problem. Go in the lobby.”
Did you try pivoting the couch?
In the 1970’s my parents bought a big forested lot on top of a hill and hired a Japanese architect to build their planned summer/weekend house there. He did a very Modern Art house with three plywood and floor-to-ceiling glass boxes suspended between large poles, connected by walkways with roofs but otherwise open to the air. There was a living/kitchen/dining box, a master suite box with a sunken tub and a sauna, and a guest room box.
It turned out that my parents didn’t use it all that much, and my husband and I ended up living there for years, while he and I both finished our degrees at the nearby university. I really hated living in that house but it was free.
The architect scorned traditional ideas about shelter, as well as eschewing any concession to the laws of thermodynamics. The kitchen was the only place that got no sunlight at all. You had to turn on the lights to see the sink. To get from one box to another – say you were in the kitchen and needed to pee – you had to heave a heavy sliding glass door open, go outside no matter what the weather and hike to the bathroom across the walkways suspended above the ground. Like camping, I guess. The sunken tub was also suspended above the ground, and uninsulated, so the best bath you could have in it was barely tepid. Since the whole house was uninsulated plywood and glass suspended above ground, the temperature inside closely mimicked that of the outside at all seasons. It had tiny electric heaters in the floor, which did nothing.
There were two good things about the house. First, it inspired me to design my own house (clearly, any idiot could design a better house than the one I was living in), which we successfully built. Second, in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake it all flew to pieces like the house of cards it resembled.