History of the Center for Creative Media
February 19th, 2006 - It is 11 degrees C, the wind is moving at 55kph, and it is snowing. Even then there continue to be small changes to the lab. Last Friday as I took time off from interviewing new job candidates, I noticed the workers laying down these bundles of aluminum onto the metal girders of the building. I am not sure what they are, but they are starting to give what is basically a metal frame some structure. I assume they allow people working on the second floor to walk around, and although I do not know if they are permanent parts of the building, certianly they are here for a while.
Other small changes keep coming, but this one is not a change, just an interest picture gotten with the long zoom lense (which froze up a couple of times in shooting). The girder shown below is the corner of the Center for Creative Media. It will end up being in the production office when things are done. The main door for the center will be about 3 meters toward the vewier, off camera in this picture. The open area, where no footers have yet been set and no girders put into place, is the entrance to the building, and our own Center.
Someone has thoughtlessly parked a crane right in the middle of edit three!!! Actually, half the crane is in edit three (Multimedia), the server closet, and the audio editing suite, the rest is in the corner of the honor lounge. The long lens used to take this picture from the safety of the fencing is causing an interesting distortion in the picture. No, the building is not bowed like a U. That is my 500mm lense having problems with straight lines when at full zoom.
This is what I have dubbed the gypsy elevator. Again, I had to use a long lense to get this shot, so it lacks some perspective, but that girder in the right corner is the edge of our lab. Just for interest, the cement going up in the background is the Swan Theatre. The story of the gypsy elevator is one that will probably never be told in its entirety, but it is interesting none the less. The story is based on an old premise. Everyone wants an elevator, no one wants an elevator next to them. Assuming this is actually an elevator shaft and not some mystical building part whose function cannot be fathomed by me (and to tell the truth without being able to walk out and pace distances I could well be wrong about it) the elevator is sitting right across from our front door. Behind it will be the Center for Law and Justice, essentially a big office that lets out onto the main entrance shared by Swan and the classroom building, while running next to it will be a tiny hall way. But that is not how it always was.

In the original plans, the Center for Law and Justice was left in Bogel, and the small room was a conference room. The elevator was safely on the other side of the building, and the server room was upstair across the hall and above the Center for Creative Media. (Of course, there was an earlier plan where the Center for Creative Media was still in Bogel, and our smaller space was Student Services, but Student Services chose to remain where they are and we got the new building, which was ok by us -- we traded space for the chance to design from the ground up). But something happened to the first elevator location. Maybe it was money, or convenience, or technicology, or for legal reasons, but it had to move from by the Bogel entrance. And thus it started moving around the classroom building. Each time a new plan would come out with a better, cheaper, and more useful space arrangement, the elevator would appear at a new location. And when the people who ended up having the elevator invade their space found out they would be bunkmates with the elevator, they would try to have it moved, usually with good logic behind them.

Anyway, what you see is its final resting place. What the gypsy elevator tells us is not that there was anything foolish about the new buildings design, but how much communication actually went on between the end users, administration, and the architects. It may seem a little thing to move an elevator, but it is not. It seems to have finally ended up in a good and usable location.
This was the best picture I could get of the crane parked in the Center. That girder is the center girder, located in the equipment lockup room (when the Center is finished). By now, the snow was coming down pretty hard, and it was hard to shoot with the long lense since I had to stick it in my shirt to get it to work, plus I had run out of deicer for the lense front. So this was my last picture. Considering how few snow storms we have had this year, I am not sure if I will get any more chances to get a picture of snow actually inside the Center for Creative Media.