Architectural Design

1) An example of architectural design that I consider to be an epic failure is the Sonic that currently opened near my house. The Sonic could not be designed worse, especially when dealing with a lot of automobile traffic. The Sonic has a row of parking spaces for people who want to be served while sitting in their car. The idea is a well thought out, and actually would work well if it weren’t for the drive through. The drive through line directly conflicts with the path to be served in your car, and if you want to go through the drive through, you have to maneuver through the entire parking lot one and a half times. Also, most fast food restaurants have cars exit through the drive through, but in this case the exit is in the back, and if you mistakenly enter the drive through, there is room enough for only one car, so you have to wait in the drive through line to exit. Cars are likely to enter the drive through line accidently because there are no signs depicting which way to drive. The behavior design of this Sonic is terrible, however from the street, the Sonic is lit up and looks very nice. It has the eye-catching persona and probably gets many customers just from the way its looks, and the name of the company.

2) The building on the Kalamazoo campus that I chose to analyze was Dewing Hall. There are many entrances to Dewing, four to be specific. If you enter either of the side doors, you will find just a set of stairs, pretty plain and uninformative. If you were a non-student this might be misleading and confusing. Also the registrar’s office is not well labeled and quite frankly hard to find. This is not good because many students need the assistance of the registrar and the office is hard to find it may frustrate or discourage kids from seeing the registrar. The building is also a relatively tall one, and if entering the building from a side entrance, one may have to walk up four flights of stairs. This is quite tedious, and the design of the elevator is quite poor behaviorally. For starters the elevator is ridiculously slow, and incredibly small. There are a lot of students who are either late/lazy and this hike up four flights of stairs is both time and energy consuming. I also noticed that if a handicapped person were to use the elevator, it would be an extremely tight fit, if the wheelchair fit at all. Most of the doors in Dewing have strangely tight hinges, and are easy to open at first, but once the door is opened past the half way point it is very hard to hold open. It is almost as if the door is pushing against the person who has it open. There have been numerous occasions where I have either ran into the door or the door has hit me in the butt as I walked through. Finally Dewing hall is not the most viscerally attractive building. The building has many neutral colors, which are bland and almost annoying to look at. However from the outside, the building looks nice, historic looking and gives off the impression of an Ivy League school.

3) The major flaw in the current architectural design process is that the user is not consulted in the design of the building. Heimsath states that, “Behavioral data are not currently developed and quantified for a building or planning project, nor is feedback a part of the process.” Feedback is an important step in the design process, something we have studied in class, and without it most designs are not as good as they could be. The user should be consulted at an earlier than they are now, which is after the building is built. The designers need to actually use the design themselves, and make sure everything works out, not according to the rules of thumb.