Lecture Hall Tiered Seating

Tiered seating in the old lecture hall in the humanities building was designed in the 1970s and it shows. After 50 years of students sitting in those wooden fold-down seats they have developed a kind of accidental beauty that no one planned for. Armrests are worn smooth where thousands of right hands have rested while taking notes, and the wood grain shows through where the original varnish has been rubbed away. Acoustic design of the room is the part that actually works well. Ceiling angles downward toward the front so the professor's voice carries without a microphone in a 200-seat room. I did not realize that was intentional until someone in my architecture class pointed it out. Sight lines are steep enough that even from the back row you can read a projected slide, which isn't true of every lecture hall on campus. Fold-down desk surfaces are too small for a laptop and a notebook at the same time, and that constraint wasn't a problem in 1974 but it is now. Good design is often just good engineering that nobody sees, and this building teaches you to notice that. Seats creak when you sit down and that sound is as much a part of the room as the architecture itself.