Fantastic quote from an interview on the BLDGBLOG site:
“Or—actually, here’s a random example. When I lived in London seven or eight years ago, I worked at Norman Foster’s office in Battersea. I’m not an architect; I was just an admin person. One day, though, my task was to go through this huge cupboard full of old VHS tapes, many of which were unlabeled. I actually had to put them into the VCR, watch them for a few minutes, take notes, and figure out what they were—then label them and stick them back in the cupboard, in an organized way, based on chronology.
At one point, I found a bunch of tapes that were nothing but surveillance footage taken inside Wembley Stadium. It was unlabeled, black and white footage of people milling about outside the bathrooms, near the ticket gate, and so on—and my initial thought was actually that some sort of crime must have taken place. There had been a stabbing, or a riot—and, I thought, maybe even someone here at Foster & Partners had been involved. That’s why we had the tapes. Then again, that’s how it always is with surveillance tapes: you’re always waiting for something to happen on them. All CCTV footage of road traffic, for instance, looks like CCTV footage taken right before an accident.
In any case, nothing happened: there was no crime. What those tapes were actually used for was a kind of spatial research project: the office had pulled a bunch of surveillance tapes from the stadium so that they could watch how people actually used the space: where they congregated, what needed to be better designed, how things really, on a social level, worked. They could then figure out how to design the next Wembley Stadium.”
