Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG speculates on architectural anomalies, unlikelihoods, and what-ifs in a way that effectively liberates building design from the limits of mortar and steel — and, not for nothing, from more elemental constraints like gravity and logic. His essay on "trap rooms" is enough to spawn nightmares. Remember the 1998 feature "Dark City," about a world which literally rebuilt itself every night, a dreamscape demimonde unfolding like an accordion while the people slept? (No? It's okay, almost nobody saw it. It was sort of impenetrably trippy. It's worth looking up, though, for Kiefer Sutherland's way, way over-the-top turn as a mad scientist.) Manaugh's rumination on the trap room is like that, at least insofar as it pushes thoughts about quotidian spaces in some uncomfortable directions. But Manaugh may have outdone himself with this short, sharp post about the "access maze," an urban amenity that doesn't exist, but should. And his speculation about what it would be like to have one borders on poetry:
You don't like your address, you simply hurl a chain-linked access stair up over and out to whatever street you prefer–and you enter there, turning a key and stepping into a steel maze of steps and ladders, cantilevered walkways and pillared decks. Fifteen minutes later, passing over and beneath ribbons of other parallel geographies, looping down alleys and nesting briefly on thin platforms in the canopies of trees, walking alone in this isolated cocoon like a private enclave in the city, you're home.
