Architecture Can Make Us Fit
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 03.12.08
In most buildings the elevators lobbies are nice while the stairs are often little more than concrete block and terrible lighting at the end of the hall, certainly not designed to be enticing. Often they are not even usable without setting off the fire alarms. Essentially the architecture is making us fat.
Bruce Fowle tries to design buildings that make us fit. It is not easy. “I had no idea until recently how many regulatory agencies are working against the notion of fitness in buildings,” the architect tells Metropolis. “We had to put elevators big enough for a stretcher in the middle of a private school where, if you are injured, ten friends will carry you. So now students take the elevators one floor.”
In the New York Times Building, designed with Renzo Piano, he put the fire stairs in the corners where the top execs usually go, made them big enough to hold a meeting, and encased them in glass.
To get people moving at SAP’s horizontal campus, Fowle spread out the elevators, gave the stairs pride of place (above), and located the cafeteria centrally, so it would feel like a town square. Photo: Jeff Goldberg/Esto
There are lots of good reasons to build this way. It saves the energy running all those elevators and escalators, and as public health scholar Richard Jackson told Metropolis, limbing a flight of stairs every day for a year can burn a pound’s worth of calories. Moreover, it promotes muscle strength and balance, which help people manage the effects of aging. “You need to build stairways the way we did classically, as places of beauty,” Jackson says. ::Metropolis
In Tom Mayne`s San Francisco Federal Building, most elevators stop only at every third floor. SFGate writes that the goal is to improve workers' health by nudging them to use stairways - and also create crossroads where employees run into each other, since each three-story segment includes a lobby with art and a viewing platform aimed toward the bay. There is a handicap-accessible elevator that stops on every floor. Some are complaining that they cannot get into the elevator because it is always crowded by lazy sorts who refuse to take the stairs.
Interesting.
Funny how so much of 20th Century design was about NOT having to expend energy unless we CHOOSE to!
They should give everyone a fob that can be sensed by the elevators and the stairways, and use that to track how much use each gets. Reward people for taking the stairs, and charge them for using the elevator (unless they have physical needs).
I have three solutions.
1) Elevators that can only go to floors in multiples of two!
Muhahah.
2) Post guards that are shoot to kill lazy bums who try to enter elevators when its not an emergency.
3) Elevators that are locked unless the alarm is on.
I think forbidding elevetors can be a little too much, but making the stairs a nice place to be is definitely a bright idea. I do not know about skyscrapers though...
It is understandable to take the elveator to the 27th floor of a building, what's not understandable is than taking it again when you need to talk to an executive on the 28th.
Improving and beautyfing staircases is definetly a top priority.
As an example, the new architecture building in TongJi university in Shanghai has an amazing interior staircase that gives the user a clear view of the whole building as the walk it's seven flights. I never used the elevator if i could help it!
We could keep the crippled kids home- then the school wouldn't need an elevator or maybe we could make people wear signs like the disabled have to park their cars...
The argument is sound for those who are healthy. The aged and disabled must be considered. I suppose you could create a separate class of citizens who get to use the elevator because they can't use the stairs or when you strain your knee playing racquetball you could go to the nurses office and get a slip... seems awfully draconian doesn't it?
It's important to separate egress stairs from communicating stairs and to understand the function of each. The Times Building is an elegant solution )although I don't know how they perform in a fire).
The function of a building is not to make you healthy- it is to serve a social or economic function.
Be careful that your choices don't become a way of discriminating against others because you perceive them as 'lazy'
Interesting that this is suddenly a "new" idea.
As an architect, I worked on a project back in 2001 where the CEO of the Client company demanded that stairwells be more prevalent and prominent and elevators be minimized to absolute minimum (location and size and amount of them).
His idea was that not only did he want people to get more exercise going among the various three or four story buildings (it was a corporate campus project), but that in business, a lot of "business" can get done in the stairwell as people cross paths, rather than having to set up meeting after meeting after meeting.
So a big YAY to Visteon for being so forward thinking way before the architectural superstars of Piano and Mayne! (and Fowle?)
The irony for people like myself, who keep fit by running, is that we competitive runners either always get injured and need elevators or log in so many miles per week that the last thing we want to do is climb stairs at work. So please don't relegate those elevators; fit people need them, too!
I remember one time at a casino in downtown Las Vegas where I decided to use the stairs to get down from my hotel room. The stairs were easy to find, due to the fir emergency notices on the hotel door, but once I got into the stairwell, it went, literally, downhill. The stairwell was dark and not well lit. When I finally reached the main floor, it turned out to go into the Casino's kitchen. Not wanting to turn back, I went through the kitchen and finally, via some poorly marked exit signs, made my way through an employees hallway and out into the casino. That was then when I noticed a big guy looking very official in a black suite was following me around, probably casino security. Needless to say, that was my last time taking the stairs at that casino, which is too bad.
Trouble with people relying on elevators is that the escape stairs are often made to look hazardous and un-user friendly, people just end up opting for the brightly lit elevators. Given great natural lighting and possible views there's no reason why people can't choose the stairs over the elevators.