The Sofa Saga

I've lived quite a few places since I started college. I had 3 different incarnations of college housing, as well as 2 places in Sri Lanka, and now I'm here in San Francisco. Every time I move, I have to spend time figuring out all the little intricacies of the new place, or I risk stumbling upon them by accident. The second place in Sri Lanka, for example, possessed the quaint little feature of a water tank on top of the building which had to be filled by pump every night. It also had a toilet that would, if not supervised, run indefinitely. The combination of these two factors caused me to run out of water in the middle of a shower, producing an explosion of profanity and incoherent yelling rivaled only when I stepped on a colony of fire ants a few days later.

Or take my most recent house in Pittsburgh which had cheap caulk around the shower. Fortunately we knew immediately when it had rotted through, because we'd discover a stream of water coming through the kitchen light fixture.

The lease started Sunday, and so far there really haven't been any issues. The space is huge, it was just remodeled, everything is new and in pristine condition. So there really haven't been any issues...except for one: the front door.

If you'll allow me to digress a bit, I'd like to talk about a job I had a few years ago as the chair of a campus production organization. We supplied lighting and sound for on campus concerts, fashion shows, culture nights, and anything else that other student organizations could dream up. As long as we had the time and the man power and no one felt the need to pulverize the potential client with the clue bat, we took the gigs. They were all over campus, and some locations off campus, and they ranged in size from a 1 hour long karaoke night with 1 speaker to a multi day multistage carnival involving all our gear, a good amount of rental gear, and all of the help we could scrape out of the alumni. If we were lucky, the alumni doubled the size of our crew and if we weren't so lucky, things didn't go so well.

As chair, my main job was to talk to potential clients and figure out if and how we could make their events happen. Because we work in so many places, we need to think of a lot of different things to make this all work. We need to make sure that the space has enough power, that we have enough set up and tear down time, that we have crew, that we can get the gear there and back, that we have food for the crew if the event is really long.... etc etc etc. Basically, we need to think of everything, because our clients rarely do. It is our job to know what we need, to figure out what the client needs, and how best to combine the two. Let me say that again. It is our job to figure out what we need to know and we must take direct responsibility for any oversights.

Now, I only held that position for a year, which wasn't really enough time to get good at it. Just when I felt like I was really starting to get the hang of things, it was time to elect the next people. But for all that, the chairs generally do a pretty good job of getting things done. So who the hell let an architect design a house that was so close to the adjacent structure that I now can't get any furniture into my apartment?!

This, folks, has been my discovery, and it is a sobering one. My main door (35 inches wide) opens into a narrow little alleyway (30 inches wide). Any furniture I bring in needs to fit both the alley and the door without turning, because there's no room to rotate anything.

I discovered all of this when the sofa delivery men showed up on Sunday to deliver a sofa, and they couldn't get it into the apartment. So, for now, I have 2 dining room chairs, a dining room table, a coffee table, and a bed. Fortunately, the chairs are fairly comfortable, because otherwise I'd have nowhere to type this.

Architects, this is your job. It is your stated duty to ensure, when designing a structure, that it will be usable by its inhabitants. And it is imperative that you get it right, because once the structure is built, it is not likely to be changed. This is a failure on your part, which is a shame because the rest of the unit is so nice. But for now, it will be nice and empty, until I find something that fits through the door.