One of the nicest houses I’ve seen is a Japanese-style house built around an open courtyard with a formal garden and a pond. All around the courtyard there’s a walkway, which is roofed, but open to the courtyard. On other side of the walkway are doors to the rooms. They are ordinary doors (easy to open and close) and there are a few interior doors between the kitchen and llving room, for instance, but to get to the master bedroom or the guest bathroom you need to walk “outdoors”.
It’s in Atlanta, which does get hotter and colder than you really want. But you don’t need to be outdoors for long, and the rooms are all climate-controlled. Very well climate-controlled, as the owner had an extensive collection of books and wooden puzzles which required controlled humidity.
There was plenty of space in this house that achieved all those goals. I don’t think it failed by making you aware of the surrounding climate from time to time.
That reminds me of the old, now demolished, Pan Am Worldport at JFK airport, although it’s not a building I’ve actually experienced personally. It’s from that early-1960s “space age” school of American architecture, where everything looked like a flying saucer. I admit I liked the look of the building, just for the nostalgic mid-century style. But the roof actually sloped up towards the outside of the building, making it essentially a giant funnel. The architect designed in drains that were in theory supposed to carry water from the roof away from the building, but in practice they got clogged with dirt and debris and led to water pooling on the roof, which led to leaks, and deterioration of the concrete.
I think the absolute worst design was of the Olympic Village in Montreal which has now been there for very nearly 50 years. It was designed by an architect from Nice (gotta have a French architect, right?) and turned into apartments when the games ended. But every apartment opens onto an open hallway that has to be traversed every time you want to empty the trash or go to an elevator. This may work well in Nice, but is hell in Montreal in January, especially when the hallways fill with ice
I taught at Columbia for two years. The first term, my office was on the 4th floor (walkup) that had several windows and under one of them was a box. I looked inside the box and there was a rope ladder!
Which reminds me of the time I spent a few days in a dormitory in Louvain-la-neuve. Outside my window, I saw a metal ladder built into an adjacent wall. I guess in case of fire, you were expected to climb onto the window and somehow swing onto the ladder and climb down. My knees get weak just thinking about it.
Since someone mentioned room numbering, I will tell a story, as told me by the grad student involved. Every floor of the Gates Pavilion at Stanford has just over 100 rooms. The administrators wanted to use 4 digit numbers. One of the members of the building committee objected and tasked his graduate student to find a way around this. At first, he tried numbering a few pairs of adjacent rooms A and B, but the administrators vetoed that. Finally, he noticed that there were some special pairs of adjacent rooms he could give the same number, suffixed M and W. They did allow that and it solved the problem. The name of the student: Sergey Brin. He never did finish his PhD.
Perhaps it’s an experiment - or a conspiracy. As another data point, I give you The Death Star, The Social Sciences and Humanities Building at the University of California at Davis. When the building was new, the janitors being assigned to it were given a special tour so that they wouldn’t get lost while on the job.
There wasn’t any talk of locked doors for the first few years (I graduated after that). The “metaphorical map of California” idea was well advertised as the reason for the building’s eccentricities. But it’s not impossible that it was deliberately made to be confusing.
I only larped there once. Those larpers, at least, mostly stayed in the courtyard.
My son and I have made several trips over the years to St. Louis to watch the Cardinals play. Using Hotwire one year, I came across a deal that happened to be a Sheraton at the time.
While it was extremely well located (right by a light rail station, walking distance to Busch Stadium, Union Station, and the Enterprise Center) and affordable, I believe it was renovated out of a factory of some kind. The center of the building was an open courtyard of sorts, illuminated by skylights on the roof, but not very well. That area was always dark and while occasionally you might see some chairs and tables set up there, it was usually empty and unused. Picture the Embassy Suites design, where every room has an interior window opening up on the center courtyard, except it’s dark and empty and kinda creepy.
Despite that flaw, we ended up staying there several different times over the years (see above, with location and affordable).I see it’s now the OYO Hotel St. Louis.
It’s bad enough to look at, but I suffered from another aspect of the building. It’s situated high above the Mississippi river, facing west, covered in shiny steel sheets. Across the river from it is Fairview-University (F-U) hospital. I was stuck in a hospital bed in a room there, facing this building. Every day, the late afternoon sun was reflected off that building, blazing blindingly into your hospital room. And no effective window curtains on the upper floors of the hospital. Was like spending an hour trapped under a Gestapo interrogation light.
Frank Gehry seems to be like so many architects – just worse – concentrating on the external appearance of the building on their drawing boards, with little concern about the interior functionality or maintainability of the structure.
I know someone who lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. He says it is beautiful, but inconvenient and expensive to maintain.
I stayed at a hotel with something similar, the interior courtyard was like 6 feet across which meant your window immediately opened up to someone else’s window. It felt like the hotel was required to have a window in every single room and this was their way of doing it.
I used to stay at the Holiday Inn in Skokie, Illinois. The first time I had a room on the first floor. I put down my luggage and went to draw the floor to ceiling curtains, only to look out at a central interior courtyard with a restaurant and some recreation. I’m glad I hadn’t gotten undressed!
I heard on a podcast where the host stayed at a hotel where the window of his room on the 1st floor immediately looked upon the very front of the hotel where you’d pick up or drop off guests in vehicles. So every 3 minutes he heard in front of a window a car stopping, all the doors opening, luggage being handled, doors slamming, car turns back on and drives away ready for the next car.
In the CSI Miami series the building has a particular hallway where Horatio often has touching personal conversations with family members of victims–the tall windows are all slanted inward at a 45-degree angle, allowing sunlight to stream in and fill the hallway with the show’s trademark warm lighting.
My workplace has a nifty hallway that looks exactly like that–about the same length, and with tall 45-degree slanted windows. Neato, right?
It’s hot as blazes during the day with all of that sun, and the windows are perpetually streaked in white bird poop.
Hotel I worked at; The underground parking structure was built below water table, no sump pumps were specified during construction… (the pits were built, just no pumps or plumbing were called for in plans.). We had them installed after the third or fourth heavy rain… same building was built with wrong type pipe for cold water main lines, also the pipes were located in the Housekeeping closets, unprotected from getting bumped into by the maid carts… thank GD the installation of the sump pumps was completed when the housekeeper on the 7th floor bumped the pipe… the line ripped right open like an aortic aneurysm from about the middle of 6th floor to the top of 7th floor…this has happened twice so far… Engineering put bubble wrap around the pipes in the closets to prevent it from happening again. And one of elevator shafts is offset by 1” between the 4th and 5th floors…it’s got a bit of a shimmy side to side as it goes by the kink in the building.
Not actually a building, but a similar engineering design decision that seems stupid (from the perspective of someone who isn’t a civil engineer, at least) – there’s a section of I-5 in Sacramento where the road surface is actually below the water level of the nearby Sacramento River. Which means water has to be pumped out every time it rains.
That section is where I-5 crosses US-50, so there are flyovers going every which way allowing from any direction to any direction on either freeway, and also exit onto various nearby surface streets, so I’m guessing 5 was made lower there so those other structures wouldn’t need to be higher.
The building I work in was expanded at least four times since it was originally built in the 60s. That means there are some fun brick accent walls on the inside. It also means that heating and cooling is a nightmare. Even though it is a relatively small building, facility management calls it the worst HVAC building on campus.
The building blueprints for the duct work and the actual duct work do not agree. There also seem to be multiple blueprints that do not agree with each other or the actual duct work.
There are multiple heating and cooling units that cover different zones. Many of the zones are non-contiguous. For example, one office may be on zone A, which also includes an open space down the hall. The office next door is on zone B, which includes several other offices in a different section. Some offices do not appear to be in any zone, or at least nobody can figure out what determines when air comes out the vent. Many of the return air vents do not actually go anywhere, only leading to closed boxes above the room.
Every few years somebody from facilities will decide to take ownership and promise to sort out the problems so we don’t have 80F offices in the winter and 62F offices in the summer just to keep other spaces at appropriate temperatures. Every time, they work at it for a week or so, and then ghost us.
I worked at a building that had a curved glass covered walkway from the parking lot to the entrance way; it would keep you covered in the rain but still allowed sunlight to shine on you while you were walking in/out…until a bird died, in the winter. (if it was a parrot instead of a crow I’d link in John Clease’s Mr. Praline). It wasn’t super noticeable at first because of the snow but since dark things, even when Pinin’ for the fjords, heat up quicker than light things, there was a melt ring around it where angelic sunlight came thru, spotlighting it. As the days went on it moved; most likely rain & gravity creating just enough friction to slide it a bit. Of course, as it slid it cleaned the dirt off of the glass along it’s path. It finally disappeared after a few weeks; don’t know whether maintenance or a vulture removed it but neither of them cleaned the rest of the glass pane so it had a memorial for another month or two until that section got dirty enough to look like the rest of the glass.
The local Zaxby’s has always struck me as badly designed. There’s a narrow spot on the path between where you place your order and the dining room, and they somehow decided that’d be a dandy location for the drink dispenser. You’re just begging to have a lot of unnecessary congestion there.
A lot of those things in that Bored Panda link are just not finished yet (and will make sense once they are finished), and some others are clearly deliberate jokes.
That’s my current apartment. It’s right next to the tracks, and the first time a train went by, I thought it was going through the living room. Now, I don’t even notice, unless I’m trying to talk on the phone at the time. And it’s about $50 cheaper than a very similar apartment a couple of blocks away.
For my own nomination, I’ll mention the local public high school. A few years ago, they put in a new wing (which was desperately needed: Before that, English and Social Studies were literally across the street, in modular units). The place where the new wing attached, there was already a hallway, so that was fine… except that hallway previously only served a single classroom, and so it was only about 8’ wide, because that was all it needed. Except now, it was serving an entire wing. For comparison, most of the hallways in the building were 12 or 16 feet.
And one more I’ll mention, the house I grew up in. This one, I can’t really fault the architect, because I’m sure this isn’t covered in architecture school, and you wouldn’t anticipate it unless you actually lived in it… but the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, directly opposite the side door, and hence the most-trafficked spot in the whole house, was directly over the furnace. Which means that there was a warm spot on the floor right there. Which means that there’s always a cat or dog sleeping right there.
The library at the Storrs campus of the University of Connecticut was very pretty when build. There were four wings cantilevered out over the ground. I don’t recall how many stories. But apparently someone forgot either that libraries have books or that shelves of books are heavy. The wings immediately began sagging and cracks opened up that turned into leaks. Whole portions of the building had to be closed off.