Lunch in the stairwell

Today I found myself feeling overworked while sitting in my office and decided that I needed to get out of it. So I took my lunch and started looking for a different place to eat it. I thought of going to the faculty club, but along the way, noticed a seat built into one of the large stairwells near the library.

So I sat in the stairwell to eat lunch.

Perhaps it's a bit strange to put seating arrangements in a stairwell, but that's the way it is. I picked a spot in a large stairwell with a seating nook that faced out so that I could see the traffic on both the first and second floor. Since the stairwell was L-shaped and at the corner of two hallways, so I could see a lot of people as they went by.

As I sat there, I began to think about the space I was sitting in. Stairwells are really just nether spaces. When you think of a stairwell, you don't think of a space to spend time in. It's a space that you move through. After all, when was the last time you stopped and sat in a stairwell?

Watching everyone go by, the liminality of the stairwell was reinforced by the way in which everyone moved. Everyone seemed very intent on navigating their way through the space, and certainly, no one else stopped. The stairwell was just a place to move through.

Space fascinates me. I don't mean the outer space kind. I mean the way that the people and spaces interact. I find space so interesting that I proposed an independent study on space during my coursework and ended up with a reading list that was about three times as long as the standard graduate course. There were over 20 books and another 20 articles and films, which meant that I read far more than anyone who might have taken a more standard course. But what it did was instill in me a continuing fascination with space.

The layout of a space affects how people feel about it and move through it. I've lived in old spaces that depress me, and small spaces that frustrate me, and beautiful spaces that inspire me (not so many of those last ones, but the older I get, the better I'm able to find those comfortable or beautiful spaces).

Spaces also are created by the people who move through them. Michel deCerteau talks about how pathways through a city for example, are actually created by the people using them. This happens regardless of their original design. Space is a construction that is created by the way in which people actually use those spaces.

People also make spaces work for them, even if the space isn't ideal. If you live in any place where more than a handful of people have come together to live in proximity, you've found spaces that don't work the same way that they were obviously designed. Some spaces make me wonder what the architect was thinking - they just seem awkward, like ill-fitting clothes. At the same time, people take those kind of awkward spaces and adapt them for uses that suit their purposes, regardless of what the architect may have desired.

Despite my reminisces and letting my mind wander through the implications of space, lunch was over too quickly. I returned to my corner of a shared office without a window...