A sky lobby is an intermediate interchange floor where people can change from an express elevator that stops only at the sky lobby to a local elevator which stops at every floor within a segment of the building. When designing very tall (supertall) buildings supplying enough elevators is a problem – travellers wanting to reach a specific higher floor may conceivably have to stop at a very large number of other floors on the way up to let other passengers off and on. This increases travel time, and indirectly requires many more elevator shafts to still allow acceptable travel times – thus reducing effective floor space on each floor for all levels. (The other main technique to increase usage without adding more elevator shafts is double-deck elevators.)
The sky lobby was invented by Fazlur Khan, a Bangladeshi American structural engineer, to resolve this issue. It was first used in the John Hancock Center in Chicago.
Read more about Sky Lobby: John Hancock Center, Buildings With Sky Lobbies
Famous quotes containing the words sky and/or lobby:
“There’s something wonderfully exciting about the quiet sing song of an aeroplane overhead with all the guns in creation lighting out at it, and searchlights feeling their way across the sky like antennae, and the earth shaking snort of the bombs and the whimper of shrapnel pieces when they come down to patter on the roof.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I’d be almost inclined not to do anything!”
—Gregory Corso (b. 1930)