In 2003-2004, the National Building Museum in Washington, DC ran an exhibition called Up, Down, Across: Elevators, Escalators, and Moving Sidewalks, and Terry Caesar’s (2000) essay looked at Japanese elevators as transit spaces that negotiate the public and the private, but generally-speaking elevators as social spaces have received little to no research attention–including within Space and Culture–since the popularity of proxemics studies in the 70s. So when The New Yorker recently ran an article on elevators, I perked right up.
Photo by ATENCION.
Smart elevators are strange elevators, because there is no control panel in the car; the elevator knows where you are going. People tend to find it unnerving to ride in an elevator with no buttons; they feel as if they had been kidnapped by a Bond villain. Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. In the old system—board elevator, press button—you have an illusion of control; elevator manufacturers have sought to trick the passengers into thinking they’re driving the conveyance. In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception—to disguise not only the bare fact of the box hanging by ropes but also the tethering of tenants to a system over which they have no command.
And as if that’s not interesting enough, I also learned that, apparently, it’s popular in New York City housing projects to “load up an empty elevator car with discarded Christmas trees, press the button for the top floor, then throw in a match, so that by the time the car reaches the top it is ablaze with heat so intense that the alloy (called “babbitt”) connecting the cables to the car melts, and the car, a fireball now, plunges into the pit.” Wow.
The New Yorker – Up and Then Down
- Anne