Staircases: The Nickolodeon building

   The last example is the building I have just gotten  We have the last new building in San Francisco for a company Twelve Entrepreneuring, and the building was nine-tenths of the way through, and I went into the building, a seven floor building, it’s going to be impossible to create the social space between the floors. “Stop the goddamn construction! Blow a hole in the building!” They didn’t like this too much!  But it turns out that we stopped the construction, we are blowing a hole in the building, in the floors, but the fire people would not let us do what is shown in this picture.
    This comes out of Nickelodeon headquarters in New York City, this is designed by the wife of my co-author, Paul Duguid, whose wife is also an architect. This is one of her buildings, but what’s happening here at Nickelodeon headquarters, they wanted to build a center staircase in the middle of their various floors of this building. And what’s turning out to happen in this particular building is that incredible social events happen actually not only on the staircase but they now use this space to hold their meetings.  So you see people hanging over the rails. Dangling over the rails. This is very informal. This is Nickelodeon.
   And this space has become a very interesting place. To create a space that brings different disciplines, people on this floor are different from people on this floor, to tie them together. So I am encouraged to see architects who are beginning to really think about the design of space as well. 
   Now, the problems I have right now with one of my colleagues, Paul Johnson [in Twelve Entrepreneuring] is that we have a hole and we don’t have a staircase.  How do we actually augment, how do we create a real social space, in terms of augmenting some virtual technologies as well. I think we ought to be able to crack a sense of social dynamics between floors of the building by using technology, correctly, we have not yet done that, so check in next year to see whether we have really been able to crack this problem. I think it is an interesting challenge.