Records, the studio and the guest floor
Floors 8, 9 and 10 are three different kinds of floor. Records is one open room full of shelving. The studio is a corridor of five desks and a spare room. The guest floor is six meeting rooms where nobody works. This is the sixth post in the series. To reach floor 10, press 0 in the lift.
The archive on floor 8
Everything the other offices file goes into one ledger, and this floor is the room that holds it. I built it as an archive is actually stored: rolling stacks on floor tracks, a handwheel on the end of each unit, and one aisle open between them at a time. Rolling stacks are what say archive at a glance.
A walkway runs down the middle from the lift. The shelving stands on either side of it, five shelves high, with boxes on most of each shelf and not all. An archive with every slot full is an archive nobody has used, so I left gaps.
At the front of the floor, under the windows, two reading tables stand across the walkway. Each seats two, one on each side. A box of papers somebody left out sits on the table, and on a desktop there is a lamp as well.
The sign you see as you step out of the lift reads THE ARCHIVE.
The front wall is the part that reads the ledger. Six cards hang in a row, one per office, each showing the office’s name and how many of its findings are open. The offices with the most open items take the cards. Under them is a board called LATELY, which lists the five most recent open findings. Each line gives the severity, the office that filed it and the title, and it adds a count when the same finding has been filed more than once.
Both are repainted whenever the ledger changes. A finding filed by an office on the practice floor appears on this wall a second later. That is the whole reason the floor exists. Without it the archive would be a room of boxes.
You do not see any of that when you are signed out. The cards go blank and the board reads Private, with a line telling you to press L to sign in. I did it that way so the wall says it is private. A wall that was merely empty would read as an archive with nothing in it.
In the back corner, beside the lift, is the records office. It is the same 16 by 14 foot glass-fronted room the gym has, because two floors wanted exactly that room and a second copy would have drifted from the first. It has a desk and a screen that reads Records and locked, and on a desktop a filing cabinet and a case of binders. The lamp by the door works like the lamps on the other floors. A clerk sits at the desk during office hours, and readers sit at the tables. Three people sit and four walk the floor, along the walkway to the first table and along the strip under the windows to the board.
The studio on floor 9
The studio has five desks, and each does a different job: Copy, Design, Press, Outreach and SEO. Writing the words on a site, auditing a layout, handling a reporter, running outreach and ranking a catalogue are separate trades. I did not want one desk doing all of them, which is why the studio is a floor of desks like engineering is.
SEO came last. The studio owned how things read, and nobody owned whether they were found. The sixth room stays free on purpose. A floor with nowhere to put the next thing is worse than one with a spare room.
The doors and signs are the ones from the engineering floor. The desk’s name goes on the nameplate and the signs, with The Studio underneath.
| Side | Front of the corridor | Second | Beside the lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| West | Copy | Press | SEO |
| East | Design | Outreach | Spare |
A studio room is dressed for people who make things look right. There is a large screen turned so two people can look at it together. A wall of eight pinned sheets hangs slightly off square, because pinned sheets are. Five colour swatches stand on the desk, and a board on the side wall reads plain words for real things.
The Outreach room has something the others lack. A month calendar covers the wall at the front of the room, covering a month. Each square can hold the posts planned for that day. Nothing posts from the building. The posts are drafts from the studio, and I post them by hand. Signed out, the wall carries dates alone, and pressing E in front of it does nothing. Everywhere else in that room, E still asks the desk.
During office hours four people sit at the desks and three walk the corridor. Office hours are 10:00 to 14:00 Eastern, Monday to Friday, and outside them the floor is empty.
The guest floor on floor 10
Floor 10 has six meeting rooms and nothing else. Three are on the west side and three on the east, named Meeting room A to F. Nobody works here. That is the point of a guest floor.
Each room has no desk. A table stands in the middle with three chairs down each long side. A screen is on the wall at one end, a jug of water stands on the table, and a plant sits in the corner. The water is there because an empty meeting room is a showroom. Nobody answers when you press E in these rooms, and no one is on the floor to answer.
Where you step out of the lift, the corridor opens into a landing: a bench, two plants and a sign that reads LEVEL 10, Guest floor. On a desktop there is also a chesterfield sofa with a low table, a rug and a side table.
The landing was once the front of the floor’s demo bay. The demo bay went down to the conference floor on 19 October, taking its seats and screen with it, and the space it left became a landing again. If you want to see a presentation, that is where to go now.