USING THE EXTRA HOUR TO STEP OFF THE TREADMILL

It’s that time of year when the US engages in its quaint ritual of switching time zones. Just as flying west and gaining time is always easy, so is switching back from Mountain time to Pacific time. I know, no one calls it that, but that’s what it is. My students think it’s some sort of natural phenomenon like tides or the shortening of days in winter, so I have to explain to them that it’s an arbitrary decision made by state and national governments to tinker with the time zones just because they can. Every year the switch back to standard time comes later in the year and the jet-lag-inducing switch to “daylight saving time” comes earlier, so I assume that eventually we’ll all just move one time zone to the east and be done with it.

It’s been weeks since I had time to write a blog post, so what better way to use the stolen hour that was just returned to us than to write something and try to banish the block that always occurs when I wait too long between posts? What to say? It doesn’t much matter what, the important thing is to put words on the page, deal with the annoying problems Google created that kept me from logging on to the blog (I had to invite myself to contribute to it to get it back online) and get the prose flowing again.

The natural rhythms of academia have reached their annual peak of frenzied activity, so I spend my days scurrying from one class or meeting to another and my evenings and weekends preparing for classes, grading papers, and doing all of the busywork associated with all of the time-consuming committees that I somehow ended up on this year. Next weekend there’s an orchid show, so I have to prepare for that. Our theatre show opened this Friday and is running smoothly, so most of the work for that is finished. Just as in teaching a class, performing is the easy part where no one sees the hours of work that were spent to make it seem effortless. 

The perfume business has pretty much been running on momentum since late August, so I feel good if I manage to fill and ship orders once a week. The good news is that Michael now helps a lot with shipping. I’ve once again increased my production capacity, so I spend all of the income from the perfume I sell buying materials by the kilo as the smaller amounts run out. One of these days it will reach equilibrium as the orchid business has, but that’s still a ways off.

More than anything else, this is just a shout to let all of my readers know that I’m still alive and well despite the fact that I’m buried in a deep, dark sinkhole of over-commitment, running as fast as I can just to keep up like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, a hamster on its wheel, or those poor souls who run on treadmills at the gym. I have never understood the fun of running and not going somewhere, but I suppose the treadmill is symptomatic of a society in which it’s useful to have training in working extremely hard to go nowhere, and feeling safe while doing it because there’s no unknown territory. Not for me. I’m stepping off the treadmill that society creates, at least for a delightful hour, to think about things and maybe actually go somewhere. 

[Illustrations from Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass; hamster wheel and treadmill from Wikimedia] 

WHAT ARE ARCHITECTS THINKING?

Every so often I'm struck by how bad design dictates how we live our lives, and how it gets perpetuated because people accept it as "the way things are". These design issues can be anything from malfunctioning perfume sprayers and uncomfortable clothing to bad urban planning and building design. Here's the first in what might grow to be a series on how design affects our lifestyles.

Part 1: Windows

One afternoon last week when I was working in my office the power went off. Not too surprising given that we had a hurricane-like storm with high winds and heavy snow, followed by a clear, sunny “eye” that was followed by more winds, snow, and rain. What did surprise me was the huge fuss going on in the hallways. People were milling around, acting as if some major disaster had happened. The last time I heard such a commotion in the hallways was during the Nisqually earthquake when the whole building was shaking like crazy at about a magnitude 7.

At first I didn’t understand what was wrong, since my laptop with its battery was working just fine, and there was plenty of light coming from my window. However, once I went out in the hall, I was reminded that most of the building is windowless. The only rooms that have windows are those around the outside of the building, and there’s an entire core and basement that depends entirely on electrical power for light, even during the day. To make matters worse, I learned that almost everyone in the building uses desktop PCs that won’t run unless they’re plugged into a power source, so crowds of students, faculty, and staff were suddenly plunged into complete darkness without so much as the glow from a battery-powered computer screen.

The building where I work was built in 1973 - not a good era for architectural design, but a precedent-setting one. It looks like a dark brick fortress from the outside. Inside, some of the walls are bare cement and others, until recently, were painted horrendous shades of orange, rust, mustard, and avocado green. Ugly as these design features are (or were), they’re cosmetic, and can be fixed quite easily. What really boggles my mind is the fact that the building is a huge 4-story square the size of a supermarket with the bulk of the rooms in the interior where there is not a single photon of natural light. I’m one of the lucky few who has an office with a window. Frankly, I don’t think I could have worked at this institution as long as I have if I had had to spend my days in a windowless room, especially one with fluorescent lights.

Next to all of the light switches in the building are placards admonishing us to “save energy – turn off the lights when you leave the room”. That’s all very well and good if we’re working at night, but the real question is why some mid-20th-century architects thought it was a good idea to make everyone turn the lights on during the day. This building is by no means ususual. Everywhere in the world there are public buildings, shopping malls, and even rooms in people’s private houses where there is no source of natural light. It’s ironic that when daylight saving time rolls around, people just go to work an hour earlier, turn on the lights, and burn them for the same number of hours that they would if they were in their normal time zone. I thought the idea was to save energy by not having to use artificial light in the early morning?

Energy savings aside, there’s something cheerful and comforting about natural daylight and being to see outside, and something annoying and depressing about spending the day in a concrete bunker with no idea what’s outside. It’s no wonder the bureaucrats, geeks, and sales clerks in their windowless cubicles and big boxes are grumpy and unhelpful. It would be interesting to know how many health problems, both physical and mental, are caused or aggravated by working day after day in windowless spaces. It would also be interesting to know how much energy would be saved if every room in every building had windows to let in light during the day. Probably enough to light up Las Vegas at night for the next thousand years.

[Supermarket and bunker photos from Wikimedia. The cat is mine.]