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[simont]

I went into town at lunchtime to run errands, and parked in Lion Yard. Rather to my surprise, this was a completely different car park from the one I parked in last time I went to Lion Yard: the Grand Arcade building project has evidently progressed to the stage where they can activate the new piece of car park and (presumably) shut down the old one to start refurbishing that.

It's mostly just a car park, but it has one or two notable oddities in its design. Firstly, even its lowest floor is a long way up in the air, and access is via an extremely long helical ramp which guarantees that by the time you get up to the car park itself you won't have the faintest idea how you're oriented relative to the shops, and hence you don't know which set of lifts to use to avoid having to walk round the entire outside of the building to get to where you really wanted to be. There seemed to be a dearth of useful signs to tell you what was where; perhaps they're going to put those up later.

Secondly, and most delightfully, there's a pair of adjacent lifts on the south side. One is labelled ‘South Lift, Levels 2 – 4’. The other sign, and I had to stare at this for a couple of minutes before I convinced myself that it really said what I thought I was seeing, reads ‘South Lift, Levels 2 – -1’. Really. Two to minus one. On a huge, beautifully presented, professional-looking sign, and moreover on a sign ten metres away from one that makes sense. To add to the visual jar, the dash and the minus sign are at different heights, which is presumably just a question of how the font they were using happened to be designed.

I'm quite tempted to go back with a camera and take a photo of it before they realise and correct it.

Comments

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

The conference center in Atlanta was likewise on a hillside, but they were boring, you just went in on the 5th floor, and went down (and along, and along, and along...) to the ground floor to get to the exit on the other side of the building.

Funny place. Then again Atlanta was a funny place wlog.