Kieran Healy

Wandering the Halls

The Australian National University’s Research School of Social Sciences, where I am presently ensconced, is a great place. It has amiable institutions such as Morning and Afternoon Tea, for instance, which make it possible to pass the entire day moving from one sort of break to another. It also has lots of interesting people in it. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find any of them because they are all located in the Coombs Building. On the other hand, you may bump into them while you are looking for your office again.

The building’s layout is a marvel of logic and clarity, provided you are looking at it from the outside and are in a helicopter. Like a gigantic carbon molecule, it is composed of three, three-storey hexagonal blocks each of which shares a side with one of the others. One (soon to be two) of the hexagons has a stub protruding from it that appears to be the bottom side of a fourth hexagon but of course is not.

Once inside the building, finding your way around is simplicity itself. Rooms are numbered according to an elementary system whereby the first digit denotes the block, the second the level and the third the room itself. You will of course not be tempted to think there are three blocks (on an obviously absurd analogy to the three hexagons) but rather will intuit straight away that there are seven. Blocks are numbered beginning with the main entrance corridor at the bottom of the middle hexagon (which offers the shortest route between the left and right hexagons) and ascend from 1-7 in half-hexagon sized chunks proceeding in a clockwise fashion along the three blocks, sorry I mean units, except for block six which is the stub to the rightmost unit mentioned earlier.

To aid navigation across the floors there are staircases on every third (or sometimes fourth) turn. Bear in mind that when you take a corner you are making a 60-degree rather than a 90-degree turn. Due to the slightly sloping nature of the site, the upper floors in two of the hexagons do not line up vertically with the third, so occasional half-staircases are necessary to facilitate the transistion from one hexagon to the next.

Seminar rooms in the building are helpfully labelled A to F. Some of them also have proper names, such as the Nadel Room.¹

The information booth (if you can find it) is staffed by helpful people who will give you directions and even a map of the building. All the same, I may soon invest in a GPS unit of some sort, and a copy of A Pattern Language, which Chris has recommended before. The book offers a set of basic building patterns that make for livable and navigable spaces, and a set of rules for distinguishing patterns that work from ones that just look good on the drawing board. I wonder if the “three interlocking hexagons” pattern is in there somewhere.

Any other contenders out there for least-easily navigable building in the world? More precisely, buildings which look at first glance like they ought to be navigable, but turn out to be impossible?

¹I believe this room is named for the anthropologist SF Nadel, whose analysis of role structures in his Theory of Social Structure inspired some of the pioneers of modern structural social theory. Nadel was amongst the first to note that an objective picture of a society’s role structure need not map directly onto the picture of that structure carried around in the heads of the people who constitute the society, and that the two will affect each other in complex ways. This seems appropriate.

If your work ever takes you out to the Australian Bureau of Statistics offices at Belconnen (a Canberra suburb) you’ll find a building that rivals Coombs for its resistance to navigation.

I have tried in the past to work out what organic molecule the layout of Coombs represents, but it’s beyond my chemistry. I think it might be some sort of hallucinogen.

Reminds me of my time in Dwinelle Hall at UC Berkeley which housed the foreign languages departments and History. Two four story structures on a steep slope linked so that the 100 level of one matched the 3000 level of another with ground floor exits on four different floors. One of my Professors recounted a story of encountering a visitor who asked “How do I get out of the building?” When queried, quite reasonably “Are you going North, South, East or West? (given that the most convenient exit would vary)” The visitor’s answer was “I don’t care, just get me out.”

I think the thing about Coombs is that it’s livable, but not navigable. Most people seem quite happy once comfortably ensconced.

The Xerox “Document University” campus in Washington DC’s Virginia suburbs should be a leading candidate. Most of it is underground (or connected by underground tunnels, and the modules that constitute the separate buildings are coded by color.

The whole thing looks like kind of a late 60s or early 70s Gene Rodenberry vision of a pod city of peaceful,intelligent, but docile, people being visited by the starship Enterprise.

The absence of windows and the fact that each corridor intersection looks like all the others (except for color coding) makes the experience very disorienting.

Paddelford Hall on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. Five towers on a hillside, six floors each, except that below ground floors don’t count. You have to go outside & across a courtyard to go from the English Department to the Spanish Department & though I spent roughly six years going in & out of the building, I sware there are some places you cannot get to from other places without going up or down a level. Felt like a game of Zork.

You can actually do a search & look at it here:
http://content.lib.washington.edu/cities/

Pretty nifty resource in any case.