ABSTRACT

Many people ask, "what is this elephant in the stairwell?"  They say, "I've never seen an elephant in Lawrence Hall's central stairwell."  Well, the phrase is really "the elephant in the living room" but here we have found one in the stairwell.  The elephant was a topic that was blatantly large and important yet nobody in the room was willing to confront the issue of the large mammalís presence.  We did.  The issue we investigated is the extreme temperatures one confronts in the southeast stairwell of Lawrence Hall.  It is clearly a problem that should be confronted and resolved.  

Simply put, the central stairwell adjacent to the Architecture and Allied Arts library in Lawrence Hall has temperatures that are outside the comfort zone for human beings climbing stairs with clothes on.  We chose this space because we experience it every day and since so many of us practically live in this building, we figured that a case study examining an uncomfortable and familiar area would be appropriate and interesting.  By recording temperature at consecutive levels in the stairwell with HOBO dataloggers, we found that our hypothesis was accurate and that the temperature controls of the stairwell should be adjusted to meet thermal comfort standards.