On the necessity of windows
I recently passed through Singapore and rested for a few hours in the airport transit hotel. It’s a useful facility which can give you something useful to do with a layover, i.e. sleep.
The rooms are in a little warren of corridors, all completely contained within the airport terminal. And the rooms look like a standard business hotel room, with a desk, a bathroom and (of course) a bed.
That’s not all. These internal rooms also have windows. They aren’t real – how could they be? Each room has a set of drawn curtains right where you would expect a window. If you look behind the curtain you find a blank wall.
Why do we feel the need for a window? One definitely makes the room more welcoming. And, because you would only to to those rooms for a sleep (if you’ve been for some other purpose please don’t tell me) the curtains add to a feeling of night time, regardless of local time or your body clock.
I once had a window-less office at a university. It wasn’t a pleasant room to be in. It might have been less unpleasant if all I ever did in there was sleep. (I remember only one occasion when I did sleep in there.)
Comment by Tim McKenzie — 4 November 2008 @ 4:53 pm
Sounds like an ideal opportunity for a “Slow Glass” salesman so that you could have a view if you were suffering from insomnia or claustrophobia.
See Bob Shaw’s “Light of other Days” at
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/shaw/shaw1.html
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_light
Comment by Alisdair McKenzie — 7 November 2008 @ 11:59 am
Alisdair
Sorry, your comment got caught in my spam trap.
Yes, I well remember and enjoyed Bob Shaw’s notions about Slow Glass. I liked the way he took one technical innovation and tried to explore the social implications.
Cheers
Colin
Comment by colin — 17 November 2008 @ 10:50 am