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Sunday, January 21, 2007

Rant-What's with these acres of wasted indoor space?

I just caught an IBM commercial. Dad had a football game on. There are four suits, i think four, certainly no more than five, and I think I saw one small red-clothed doing-nothing table, in this HUGE space. A wall of windows climbing stories high, and I'm no good with judging space, but it looked like acres of immaculate, empty, fake marble,"area." I suppose the purpose of it is to walk through to get to the offices where people work in cublicles.

I mean, really. All that space needs to be heated, or cooled, cleaned, lighted. Materials go into building all that indoor emptiness, and it's everywhere-the inside empty space. Maybe out of the photo frame were groups of elevators, (there's a word for that but I forgot it) but they certainly weren't close by. Even here in PCB, the new medical center they built on the beach has wide, wide hallways with maybe a couple of people using them at a time. Every SINGLE elementary school has at least a dozen portable classrooms in this town-taking up grounds that were once used for play.

I remember when they built the new Juilliard at Lincoln Center. The dance department got two (beautiful) dance studios. The rest were leased to New York City Ballet to help pay for the building. They were supposed to be our studios, of course. And guess what? Acres of empty space for no practical reason at all. And guess what else? They built the practice rooms for the musicians WITHOUT SOUNDPROOFING. The pianists could hear the violins who could hear the trumpets, oh it was awful. They had to hang every little practice room with insulating curtains. Unbelievable.

Okay, the outside public space at Lincoln Center is cool. Day and night filled with people, a huge, cooling fountain, performance events all the time. (We even staged an anti-Viet Nam war protest after the students were killed at Kent State.)

No, what infuriates me is all this acreage devoted to what? Ego? Someday we'll run out of space. And fossil fuel. And people who can afford to live close enough to these enormous buildings to work there in little cubby holes.