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You’d need that space to go somewhere, so the rest of the floor would either need to be a meter thick, you’d need a big protrusion into the lower floor, or you’d have to have it on the ground level with nothing underneath.
You’d also be pretty locked into the floor plan layout, and there would be no place to put a TV screen that’s visible from the whole seating.
Pretty cool looking, but also pretty impractical with modern buildings.
there would be no place to put a TV screen that’s visible from the whole seating
That was kind of the point, it was called a “conversation pit”
Like, people would just sit around, look each other in their stupid faces and talk? Gross. /s
It sounds like a nightmare, but I’m sure the coke helped.
This would be absolutely awesome for tabletop games.
The selection of board games at the time wasn’t what we had now, but holy sweet fuck that place would be great to play Acquire
So many new business ideas.
Oh damn i just coke pit commented then read that you’re ahead of me.
That’s a fun term for “cocaine pit”
And i thought it was orgy pool
Naïve of you to think that this space needs a TV, when any house like this is probably large enough and expensive enough to have a proper home theater room with a proper projector and surround sound system.
You’re probably right for a home with this setup today. Back when these were really popular, probably not.
Home theaters are a fairly recent thing and were not the norm, even for people with these types of setups, outside of maybe the uber rich who could afford a projector and the cost of prints. For a sense of costs, a Super 8 reel of a theatrical film would run anywhere from $600-$1000 (accounting for inflation).
If we are placing this setup in a time where a home theater would be prohibitively expensive, then it is also the time when a TV is a boxy space hoarding big blurb of NTSC/PAL glass. Making the whole TV discussion moot. There was probably a TV room with a more traditional sofa and a large wall embedded CRT TV. Still, in a house with a conversation pit there was no consideration for, nor expectation for a TV to be present in the living room. That is also a post modernist expectation, where screens are ubiquitous, demanded and expected to be present at all times.
Dont forget the tripping hazard!
Just land on the couch problem solved.
I think this is made for swinging lol.
Everything at the time was made for swinging, coke, or both.
Even the coke was made for swinging!
But it can also works as an indoor pool in summer.
Swim and wash the cushions in one go. Efficient.
Pretty cool looking, but also pretty impractical with modern buildings.
It’s funny because it’s literally the opposite: “modern” buildings (read: of the “modernist” style popular circa 1930s-1970s) are the only kind that do have these things.
It’s buildings that are newer than modern that don’t have them because people realized they’re impractical.
I think they mean lower case m modern (ie. contemporary) not upper case Modern
You don’t need the tv visible from the whole seating area - that seating area is massive. You could put an 80” on a stand either along the side (where the flowers are) or on one of the corners, and still have room for an easy 8 people watching.
In my experience, you can get 6-8 people coordinated for watching a movie at your house. After that, you have a hard time finding something everyone is going to enjoy, you have bio breaks, and in general people like to just talk. Admittedly, we don’t watch sports, but even so I think rounding up 12-16 people (which would probably fill up this pit unless everyone were very close friends) would be a chore.
I have a lovely MCM house. It’s nowhere big enough to have a pit like this, but it does have an atrium. We throw parties pretty regularly, and once we get above 6-7 people, most of the time we’re just throwing on some music and letting everyone mingle. If we do put on a movie, it’s more of a background thing, and I honestly think most people prefer a good playlist and ready-to-go cocktails.
Easy, you put 4 TVs on each side. A good signal splitter and some nice speakers overhead and you all enjoy watching tv at a strange angle that hurts your neck. (Also don’t try to do surround sound).
there would be no place to put a TV screen that’s visible from the whole seating
Unironically the singular reason these things aren’t built anymore.
TVs and tv shows at the time were shit. Entertainment was talking with people.
Everyone talking about the pit and I’m just here thinking “housing?”
The dream is still achievable. My brother and I teamed up with our spouses and bought a home. Between the four of us we were able to buy a house. Just the one.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know:
Either these couches are really tiny, or room in this image is really big. It looks like the room is like six times the size of my college dorm. If the rest of the house is similarly sized, it’s probably also insanely fucking expensive. middle school gymnasium ass room
Yea, I’m estimating that couch pit is about 15’ square. So that room has to be close to double that in depth. It’s probably a mid century ranch house, all 1 story. You could put a huge hookah in the middle. Or a console pac-man game!
A hooka with opium in it.
If you stare hard enough, you can almost hear the keys dropping into the bowl.
Silicon Valley horndogs are still absolutely doing this shit. They just do it in a room that’s plastered floor to ceiling with giant TV screens, rather than in a soft velvet-lined passion pit.
Key parties are the most stupid horny rich people shit I can imagine. Group sex without ritual (except maybe a bonfire) is the stupid horny shit of the proletariat
Regect weird rich people orgies of modernity, embrace weird backwoods bonfire orgies of your ancestors.
You misspelled gooning
Gooning is the horny of the worker isolated by industrialized society. Band together to bang it out by a bonfire in honor of the equinox! Unless everyone is cool with you gooning to them doing that, nothing wrong with someone masturbating in the corner of the orgy if that’s their thing.
I gotta watch The Ice Storm again.
Oh that movie is SO wild.
I don’t think they bothered driving to other places, but I don’t know.
the money and cocaine ran out
Sad times.
cocaine doesn’t trickle down either
If I recall correctly, I think building codes surrounding tripping/fall hazards and railings may have had something to do with it unfortunately. I may be mistaken though
That would make sense because I can see a lot of tripping and falling leading to injury in a cocaine lounge.
It was probably a falling hazard for children. So I’ll blame the children for ruining the cocaine lounge.
That looks ideal for children tho. It’s practically soft play.
I can see the tripping and falling leading to sex and debauchery. This is what they’ve taken from you.
also Disco. don’t forget Disco.
This is the world OSHA has created. I say we return to Darwinism.
To some extent that’s how it is in the Netherlands, at least when compared to countries like UK/US with strict health and safety/codes. Railings to stop your car from falling in the canal? Fuck that if you can’t park within a tiny space without falling into the water you deserve to die.
same goes for staircases. A student dorm I frequented in NL had a staircase in the library that was super steep, had no railings and if you trip you fall like 10m. Every step was of a different size.
Ah yes even in most slightly older normal houses you risk your life every time you go to bed upstairs. Friend of mine almost came tumbling down from my attic once, it’s standard.
I stayed at a hotel in Amsterdam that was on the fourth floor, so up three flights of stairs but with no landings on each floor, and the stairs were like 4" deep with 10" risers and there were no railings. And I had to drag two rolling suitcases up with me. I couldn’t help but feel like “they don’t really want me here”.
Amsterdam is not a place for dangerous terrain, since most people go there to get wasted their whole trip.
That’s certainly why I went there.
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God damnit OSHA.
OSHA is workplaces. Building code is relatively unrelated
What do you mean lot laying pipe on that pit.
Pretty sure you could still get away with this - if the drop is less than 30" no railing is required.
Also any water on the floor can be spilled over into the pit.
I built a conversation pit in Minecraft because I wanted one so bad
Today that place in the middle would be blocked off by drywall and rented out for $1500/month.
Plus hydro.
ALAB.
That article has to be a plant written by a landlord
I really, really hope this is satire.
not gonna lie, I always wanted a home with a sunken living room table/couch like this.
Even today I think its bad ass and interesting… probably a pain in the ass to clean, though.
Especially since everyone has to put their feet on the cushions to get in and out
lol it’s not a ball pit. They always have access points, this one has stairs that kinda blend in with the center pieces of the glass table in the middle.
Alright, screw the orgy couch, I need a ball pit in my living room
You could arguably call an orgy couch a ball pit too.
That’s definitely an image I didn’t want my brain to generate
Woah, I can see the stairs now!
I’ve seen ones where you literally just step down onto the couch to get into. Mostly smaller ones.
Oh I didn’t see the stairs in the picture. Although, I do remember seeing in some movies or TV shows that people were climbing in and out on the cushions because the circle didn’t have stairs.
My spouse: I was promised flying cars, and I don’t even get a conversation pit!
The internet IS our conversation pit.
It’s a pit all right.
Just not a Super one
When I was an installer for a WISP, I was installing to a lot of big fancy farm owner homes; and one of them had this. That house was swanky as fuck. It was practically custom built for partying. Place had 3 kitchens (2 indoors, and 1 outdoor), bars in nearly every room, etc. I wish I lived there… 😞
Three kitchens! Were they Italian?
It’s because folks kept falling into them at night and breaking their necks.
Exactly. I literally see no point in this. You can have the same but elevated and a little entrance.
So I have some family that lived in a gated community that used to be a resort for Golden Age Hollywood types. Their clubhouse/community building hadn’t been updated much since then, and it had one of these.
100% certain that a) group sex happened here, and b) at least one person broke their ankle in this thing. 90% sure there was at least one time both happened at once.
Probably the person who broke their ankle did it in some wildly adventurous sexual position mid intercourse and kept going until it was complete like a champ.
They took your own generations ability to have silly architectural trends - by the banks and Realestate agencies pricing most out of the market, and by refusing to mass build new towns for cheap.
IRL they mostly used these for group sex. It would be super weird to have everyone just sitting around talking all at the same time. Cult shit.
