wayfinder posted:

VideoTapir posted:

I worked for a summer inspecting school building fire alarms. We were constantly updating the plans with discrepancies in how the school had been built...still finding them years after the last remodel. They're called "as-builts." My favorites were the chem-lab-equipped high school with fewer smoke detectors than the average elementary school (happened to be my high school), and the firewall that ran like half the length of a (different) high school building but only extended up to the suspended ceiling. The "fix" for that one was to put three smoke detectors above the ceiling in that hallway.

wayfinder posted:

Chinatown posted:

thats really good hth

the rainwater from the majority of the roof empties into the pool

therattle posted:

But it looks like a 3-eyed Mutant Ninja Turtle

peanut posted:

99 pages but a good post ain't one

Feminition posted:

Great presentation for the HQ of a religion. The Vatican should take notes.

A misanthrope posted:

these stairways with no railings itt are loving lol

toddlers drown themselves in buckets and hang themeselves with window blind cords. railing-free stairs have to be like a toddler holocaust

SPACE HOMOS posted:

Is there a reason the scientology buildings are blue?

Default Settings posted:

All I can see is this:

Grand Prize Winner posted:

That building was clearly something before the Scientologists bought it, but I can't figure out the right search terms to find out. Anyone have an idea?

Blistex posted:

I like big juts and I can not lie
You other realtors can't deny
That when a house goes up with a ton of wasted space
And a faux-dormer thing in your face
You get 25-percent down!

Not so much a failure as nouveau-bland design and colour taking over. (Guess what colour the entire interior is)

peanut posted:

Warm Grey? Beige? Greige?
I had to choose house siding recently and those are the only options

Noggin Monkey posted:

Taupe. Definitely taupe.

Jerry Cotton posted:

Sometimes buildings serving a particular function look like fortresses because they were, in fact, built like fortresses for a reason. I don't know if that was the case here but it doesn't seem too unlikely.

quote:

...One company that has long taken seriously the idea of "hardening" its facilities against nuclear attack is AT&T. "In the mid-1960s" said Art Ammon, network operations manager of AT&T's Long Lines department, "we were installing a lot of interstate cable facilities, and we constructed a number of underground buildings. We were consciously trying to build plant [facilities] that would survive."

In addition to underground operating and relocation centers, AT&T buried much of its long distance cable four feet deep. Key transcontinental cables were routed around major cities that would be prime Soviet targets, and selected microwave towers were specially strengthened.

"In recent years," Ammon said, "as has been the case everywhere, we have relaxed to a certain extent. Now the whole issue is being reexamined. We have gone out and surveyed every one of our relocation centers, and we're working on a set of recommendations for all the Bell companies. The system is not in disarray; we're talking about some fine-tuning. We may even be making some improvements in Netcong."

Netcong, New Jersey, is the site of AT&T's National Emergency Control Center. Located 15 miles north of the Long Lines operations center in Bedminster and 40 miles from corporate headquarters in New York City, Netcong is marked on the surface only by a modest yellow brick building the size of a large garage. Visitors are buzzed in through two doors, walk down four flights and then pass through two heavy vault doors that open automatically one at a time (and could leave an unwelcome visitor stranded in the dead space between them).

Netcong works every day as a switching and control center for long distance calls, which pass rapidly and silently through banks of 11-foot-tall multiplex switching units. The units are hung from the ceiling by heavy steel springs and tethered to the floor with thick rubber bands. If the building were struck by a massive blast wave, the rubber bands would snap and the switching equipment would swing, cushioned by the springs, from the ceiling.

All of the equipment at Netcong is shock-mounted, including the toilets, and the building is stocked with enough food, fuel and other supplies to run for a month cut off from the outside world.

Before being cut off, however, plans are for it to be staffed by personnel from the Bedminster operations center down the road and by top corporate executives. The Bedminster staff would take over a large and now unpopulated room that is equipped with desks, phones, computer terminals and everything else needed to monitor and route calls through the nation's long distance telephone network, or what is left of it. An adjoining large open office lined with plain steel desks is reserved for corporate executives. "It's rather spartan," admits Netcong Operations Manager Gene Koppenhaver, "but hopefully we'll never have to use it."

But there are some minor perquisites of rank even at Netcong. A small office next to the emergency control center contains two desks only. One bears a nameplate reading, "Chairman of the Board-Mr. Brown." The second-and slightly smaller -desk's nameplate reads, "President AT&T-Mr. Ellinghaus."

The nameplates are kept up to date.

remusclaw posted:

This actually kind of works for me because I'm pretty sure that this set up is based on the set of Babylon in the D.W. Griffith silent epic "Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916)" As a nod to Hollywood history, I cant think of many better options for monumental. It's tacky but its Golden age of Hollywood tacky.

Blistex posted:

I like big juts and I can not lie
You other realtors can't deny
That when a house goes up with a ton of wasted space
And a faux-dormer thing in your face
You get 25-percent down!

Not so much a failure as nouveau-bland design and colour taking over. (Guess what colour the entire interior is)

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Is this in Idaho? Looks eerily similar to my sister's house.

Default Settings posted:

All I can see is this:

Jorghnassen posted:

My favorite "this was supposed to be a hospital in the desert" building, where they recycled the design for a boreal college...

blowfish posted:

a strikingly empty parking lot

Accretionist posted:

A strikingly large parking lot.






I hate that parking lot.

Groovelord Neato posted:

why build a parking lot that could fit everybody in your state.

Cacafuego posted:

It's Oklahoma, what the hell else are they going to put there?

Computer viking posted:

To be fair we don't know when that satellite pass was. But yes. And that contrast with Rome is kind of striking - is that some online tool or a Photoshop job?

Magikarpal Tunnel posted:

I was curious about this, and the image says the imagery date (not sure if that is the date it was uploaded or the date it was taken by the satellite?) is 10/5/2013. So that's a Saturday, usually a pretty busy day for malls.