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Dr. Phage on New Buildings on UW Campus

Dr Phage

  “blocks all your natural light and creates offices less than 10 yards away with windows looking directly into your office”

   I sympathize with the complaint that a proposed new building “blocks all your natural light and creates offices less than 10 yards away with windows looking directly into your office”.  However, this experience could be looked upon nowadays as one of the blessings of Progress.  In the south campus, new construction in some cases had the effect of not merely removing natural light, but of removing some windows altogether.  Indeed, when Stockholm announced the award of the Nobel Prize in Physiology to Professor Edmond Fischer in 1992, the University of Washington was in the process of walling up the south-facing windows of his office, and of the rest of the south-facing offices in the SOM J-Wing.  I was fit to be tied when they walled up the south window of my office, but in time I became reconciled to the new edifice that was cemented to what had been the J-wing’s south side.  This was because it made a restroom available to me just a few steps away—not a Nobel Prize, to be sure, but at least a decent consolation prize for losing that natural light.

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