Agustín Jiménez

Observations about tech, design and people. Since 2010.

Designed chaos in architecture

It’s taken for granted that order makes our life easier. And it’s also better known that shopping malls are created so that you have to walk a little bit to come across shops while you seek for the next escalators.

What really surprised me was to know that some malls are designed to get us completely lost. They talk about it in The secret life of buildings, a great series that face how building’s shape affect us. Since watching it, I’ve been quite obsessed  analyzing path routes in every shopping mall I visit. It turns up to be kind of fun to discover every trick that architects have planned to makes us walk along the building:

  • Escalators that drives you not just one floor, but accidentally two or even more without almost noticing it.
  • Lifts that works only for some floors.
  • Levels that are only accessed by some lifts and escalators.
  • Different placement of lifts and escalator, it’s a seek and find game to spot the right one that takes you where you want.
  • Solitary escalators to which you have to walk, just to check if it’s going up or down.
  • The list continues up to the infinite…

The series can be found here:

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=XWZHIMJO

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=GHIWY73L

http://www.megavideo.com/?d=ZWP5AZOP

Thanks to Dámaris for telling about this!

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