Dave Newt wrote the following in:


Robin May wrote:
Dave Newt wrote the following
in:
To be honest, I suspect the dropping of ST&M was mainly to raise
the profile of the Business School who just spunked 25 mil up
Norman Foster on a new building.


Someone kill that man, he is responsible for the atrocity that is
the central spiral staircase in the LSE library.

Oh, I quite liked it, but then I was shown around it a few days
before it, and that was more for the purposes of "look at our new
cool thing" rather than actually trying to get any books.

It looks very nice...

He also designed the GLA
building which has a similar spiral staircase. Usually the
purpose of a staircase is for people to walk on it, but with the
LSE one the main purpose is so photos of it can be put in
university publicity. I firmly believe that the designer of these
things has never tried to walk on them.

Why is a spiral staircase so hard to walk up anyway? I don't
remmeber LSE's being particularly tricky?

The steps on the stairs are set at a distance which is about 1.5 times
that of a normal person's stride. This seems to be true for people of
all heights and leg lengths. No matter who you are there is no way you
can get into a comfortable stride for walking down the stairs, you
always have to do a funny lopsided walk and you have to adjust every
few steps. You end up walking normal step, normal step, short step,
long step, normal step etc. It seems alright at first, but after a
while it becomes incredibly annoying.

(Though I do know from experience at York that having the main
staircase in the middle of the open building is utter crap for
noise levels if you are trying to work.)

Surprisingly, that's not much of an issue. Bookshelves surround the
central staircase and the work areas are behind the bookshelves. The
books seem to do an impressive job of absorbing the noise and the
experience of walking from one end of the shelves to the other and
hearing the noise disappear is very interesting.

--
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Drinking Special Brew will get you drunk in much the same way that
going to prison will give you a roof over your head and free meals.

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