Think of a corridor in a carnival fun house, where the floor pitches and the walls sway.
In the basement of a six-story, red-brick building on the Bowery, there is a room where the floor pitches toward a central drain.
Halls of residence are territorial, and there is nobody you feel more kinship with in the world than these four-to-18 people you have been forced to live with and hate, which is why when your floor pitches up an uneasy friendship with another floor fireworks are bound to occur.
One of the tenant leaders, Gladys Salva, is on the 2 line, and she said she barred the landlord's contractors because even though her bathroom floor was pitched sharply to one side, it was still usable.
My floor's pitched at a 45-degree angle, and I have one electric hot plate, one propane burner, a toaster oven, and an old Cadillac of a fridge.
People throw their clothes on the floor, somebody pitches their stuff in without looking because they're in a hurry but you must keep the room clean to reclaim floor space.
The result is very wacky: automobiles throb; buildings pulse; eyes and mouths loom away from faces; pavements, ceilings and floors pitch and yaw, as if aboard a ship.
At the Adult Entertainment Expo in 2009 the porn industry's annual convention, piggybacked onto the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas each January the company blitzed the showroom floor, with models pitching the machine as the next generation of online porn.
Now the floors are pitched at a 7.3-degree angle, and picture frames have shifted to a crazy angle that brings a carnival fun house to mind.
Also, I plan to build a structure called the Music Box, in which the entire structure (stair steps, tension rods, chambered tile flooring) is pitched and able to become a huge musical instrument, installation space, and architectural instrument, at a very high level of design and instrument craftsmanship.
