This was my first time ever step­ping foot into Guthrie Hall, which houses the Depart­ment of Psychol­o­gy. First impres­sions were not very impres­sive. It was quite dark and cramped. There was a display case filled with books you can’t pick up or read because it’s surrounded by glass walls that you can’t open. I never under­stood the point of those. The ceil­ing was quite low and the hall­way was pretty narrow. I didn’t explore the build­ing at all but it looks like it has a perime­ter hall­way with big class­rooms in the inte­rior area and offices around the exte­ri­or. Walls and ceil­ing were concrete, which I don’t neces­sar­ily mind as a mate­r­ial for build­ing inte­riors but you need a ton of light in the build­ing for it to not seem like you’re going on a spelunk­ing expe­di­tion in the Indone­sian archipelago. It was quite depress­ing to be honest. You’d think that psychol­o­gists would have stud­ied these kinds of things in the 70’s before the rise of these ugly, boxy, concrete-s­teel contrap­tions on college campuses around the coun­try. What were these guys doing in those times?

The hall­way layout was a bit confus­ing because you could go either left or right after enter­ing the super-cramped lobby. It also didn’t help that there wasn’t a map near­by. I defi­nitely looked lost while I was trying to find some means with which to orien­tate myself. Luck­ily there was a map on the left side of the lobby, as well as the hall­way to the bath­rooms which were just around the corner.

Expec­ta­tions were low consid­er­ing the drab-ness of the inte­rior but I was pleas­antly surprised. Guthrie has the precious amenity known as urinal divid­ing walls. They also had the uncom­mon feature of having a shelf above the line of urinals so I could conve­niently place the note­book I was carry­ing in my hands on it as opposed to drap­ing it over the divider, which I might or might not have done in Paccar the other day. This gave me the illu­sion that I was actu­ally peeing into a plas­tic-porce­lain-s­teel box that was quite the expe­ri­ence. This was a pretty small space but I think that the dividers give bath­room users another advan­tage in that it gives the percep­tion that your pee space is a lot larger than if there were no dividers because it rein­forces your personal space with defi­nite bound­aries. When there are no dividers all bath­room users’ personal space bubbles quite resem­ble Venn diagrams. You can come up with your own label for the over­lap­ping section because there are way too many innu­en­does in my head to pick just one. I’m going to keep Guthrie in mind when I’m walk­ing along that strip of Stevens. My go-to in that part of campus was the Archi­tec­ture build­ing next door but that might have to change in a minute.