Sibley Dome’s disappearing egress doors

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A new lecture hall was recently completed in the historic Sibley Dome on Cornell’s campus. It’s a successful design in many respects, but the two exit doors seem to challenge a code requirement stipulating that “means of egress doors shall be readily distinguishable from the adjacent construction and finishes such that the doors are easily recognizable as doors.” The rationale for this requirement is clear: in a fire situation, when smoke may obscure exit signs and paths of egress, the last thing you’d want is to have trouble identifying the location of exit doors because they are purposefully designed to blend into the surrounding walls.

Check out all the 90-second videos in this series.

Rough landings on College Avenue, Ithaca

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An apartment building on College Ave. in Ithaca, NY has a number of exterior stairways, most of which have landings adjacent to a sloping sidewalk with illegal discontinuities between the landings and that sidewalk. These landings should be protected at their discontinuous edges with wheel stops and extended handrails. Explained in 90 seconds in my latest iteration of “Adventures in Building Bad.”

Find links to all the videos in this series.

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Adventures in Building Bad, Episode 13: No bathroom, no exit? No problem — parody

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One of the problems with parasitically placing bathrooms and required fire exits in a building adjacent to Cornell’s Milstein Hall, so that your open studio spaces are not compromised by such mundane building requirements, is that those bathrooms and exits become unavailable for at least two years when the adjacent building is renovated. Cornell did what it always does in such situations; instead of fixing the problem, it applied for a New York State code variance, which was granted. In response, I wrote a parody article based on Guy Horton’s Metropolis paean to Rem Koolhaas and his Venice Biennale theme of Fundamentals.

See my original parody paper here.

Links to all my “Adventures” videos can be found here.

Cornell’s “virgin” legend

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Painted footprints (see “virgin legend“) have been physically marked on Cornell’s Arts Quad since 1936, renewed annually by the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity, and tacitly supported by the Cornell administration. Masquerading as a harmless “prank” and “tradition,” this practice in fact suggests that on Cornell’s campus, men have the right to define the proper sexual function for women.

Milstein Hall’s dysfunctional urinals

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The lastest episode in my “Adventures in Building Bad” short-form video series is about bathrooms and urinals in Milstein Hall, the OMA-designed architecture building at Cornell. Plus a short digression (very short; the entire video is only 90 seconds) about the Marcel Duchamp readymade and some similarly beautiful urinals in Cornell’s Barton Hall.

FInd links to all the other videos in this series here.

Dangerous guardrails at Cornell

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Here’s my latest 90-second video, part of the “Adventures in Building Bad” series which drops each Wednesday at 11 am ET on Instagram and YouTube. This one looks at a recent change in the building code that makes it harder to have inadequate guardrails on occupied roofs. Even so, there are relatively new guardrails on the occupied roofs of two libraries at Cornell which would not be compliant under the new code.

You can find links to all the videos in this series here

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Upskirting at Cornell

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A recent article in the New York Times reminded me of an issue that emerged when a new Fine Arts Library opened at Cornell University using open metal grating as floors for the stacks — the issue of upskirting. In this video, I show how denials by the architect and Cornell administrators are contradicted by the obvious reality: yes, you can look up through these gratings.

Although I wrote about this issue in this blog in 2020, I recently created a short 90-second video on the same subject for my “Adventures in Building Bad” series.

The complete list of “Adventures” videos can be found here.

Adventures in Building Bad, Episode 7:

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Both the ADA and the IBC stipulate that circulation paths must be accessible to people with various disabilities, but illegal protruding objects are still common. In this 90-second video, I look at a few examples in Ithaca, NY, specifically, problems with vertical clearance that often—but not always—result from sloping elements that protrude into the circulation path.

Find links to all the “Adventures” videos here.