The gym and the canteen: floors five and six
Floor 5 is a gym and floor 6 is a canteen. Each is one open room with the lift at the back, so you step out and see the whole floor at once. This is the fourth post in the series. The floors below had corridors and doors. These two have none.
The training floor
I laid it out the way a CrossFit box is laid out: the rig down one wall, lifting platforms in front of it, storage down the other wall, and the middle left empty. The empty middle is the point. It leaves room for about forty people to work out without anyone swinging a barbell into anyone else.
The rig runs down the east wall in seven bays. Each bay has a pull-up bar high across it, and every other bay has a lifting platform with a loaded barbell on the floor.
Along the west wall you will find two plate trees, a dumbbell rack, a kettlebell shelf, a shelf of medicine balls on their sides in rows, a stack of plyo boxes and a row of wall balls. On a desktop browser there are also mats, a mirror wall behind the dumbbells, a flat bench and an adjustable one, and a water fountain by the office.
Cardio stands across the front: four rowers and three upright bikes, and behind them on a desktop four treadmills and four spin bikes. A power rack and bench sit on rubber tiles in the back corner. Under the whiteboard there is a stretch corner.
The whiteboard reads TODAY, 21-15-9, thruster 95 lb, pull-up. I put it up because a clock and a whiteboard are the two things anybody in a box actually looks at. The clock hangs on the same wall.
On a desktop, six people are on the floor. One stands behind a treadmill, one beside a rower, one at the power rack, one at the dumbbells, one sits on the flat bench and one is at the fountain. They are idle poses. I have no workout animations yet, so nobody lifts anything.
The lighting is high bay: bright and even, in two rows of ceiling strips.
The office in the corner
The back-west corner, next to the lift, holds a small glass-fronted office. It is 16 feet by 14. It stands where whoever runs the place would sit to watch the floor, and it is beside the lift so you pass it on the way in.
Its front wall has a door with glazing on either side, and its east wall is glazed too. Inside are a desk, an orange chair, a monitor, a cabinet and a plant. The orange is the colour of the Hitt Fitness signs, including the one over the door.
This is the Hitt Fitness desk from the engineering floor, moved up to live where its product lives. It behaves like the desks in the corridors. A lamp by the door is dark, amber or green. The screen reads Hitt Fitness and, to anyone not signed in, the word locked. When I am signed in, pressing E in the office opens the desk.
On a desktop, a QR code on the wall beside the door links to hittfitness.com. It sits on a white plate in an orange frame.
A HITT FITNESS sign also hangs where you step out of the lift, so you know whose floor this is before you have looked around.
The canteen
Floor 6 is laid out like a hospital canteen, because that layout works. There is a long servery with the kitchen behind it and the dining room in front. The queue runs past the food and out into the tables rather than through them, so nobody carrying a tray has to cross anybody waiting.
The first version put the kitchen across the back wall. The lift is at the back of every floor, so the serving wall stood directly across the lift doors. The kitchen now sits at the front of the floor. You arrive at the back, walk forward through the dining room, and the servery is the thing you are walking toward. That is also the right way round for a queue.
The serving wall is solid except where the counter is. An earlier build had a full slab behind the counter, so it looked like the back of a counter with nothing to serve from. Now there is a hatch cut through the wall, a little over three feet tall and nearly the length of the counter, and you can see into the kitchen through it.
The counter takes up about three fifths of the width. It has six hot wells sunk into the top, a tray rail along the diner’s side at counter height, and a glass guard leaning out over the food. Trays are stacked where the queue starts and the till is where it ends. The staff door is at the far end, away from the serving line.
Over the counter hangs the menu board. It reads TODAY, soup, roast, pasta, salad bar, tea, coffee. It is a sign. Nothing on this floor takes an order, and the floor has no panel to open.
Behind the hatch the kitchen has a bench down the middle, a cook line under an extractor hood and wire shelving on the back wall. On a desktop a cook stands at the range, two people serve and two wait in the queue.
The dining room is a grid of round four-tops, four chairs each, in rows nine feet apart. A walkway runs down the middle from the lift, wide enough that no table is in the lane out of the lift. The first row was once four feet in front of the doors, and you stepped out into somebody’s lunch, so I moved the grid forward. The chairs are the food court chairs from the mall, from Poly Haven under a CC0 licence.
Along the window wall there is a run of banquettes in channel-tufted, each with a small table, and on a desktop somebody is eating at every other one. Down the west wall are a drinks chiller, a coffee station with a microwave and a recycling point, with one person waiting at the coffee machine.
A CANTEEN sign stands where you leave the lift. The directory in the lobby lists the floor as the canteen, with the servery, the kitchen and the dining room.