The Random Lift Button project was conceived as an opportunity to exemplify further the role of space at the mercy of time. Certainly in large commercial buildings lifts are implemented to squash space and enable people to move more quickly from one work activity to the next. Lifts become a temporal slippage in the experience of a building as a whole, we skip space and avoid people, places and the opportunity to see the ‘whole’. Indeed corridors and stairwells are recognised as important social spaces within businesses and many more negotiations and affairs occur between office spaces than within them. Just like in hypertext our choice of destination is provided to us with the minimum of ‘journeying’. The Random Lift button is exactly what it suggests; a button to take you anywhere in a building, thus expanding the space and enabling you to visit spaces that otherwise the economic architectures of today would attempt to hide you from.

Random Lift Buttons are being installed into the new Portland Square Building at the University of Plymouth designed by Fielden Clegg Bradley Architects, and installed with help by Buro Happold Engineers and OTIS lifts.