Rosio Pavoris

I’ve complained about my “college” before (though not nearly as much as they deserve), but this time they’ve outdone themselves.
Our department is moving to a new building this semester, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on (I’d think it’s because the old building is falling apart, but apparently the KUL (that is, the parent university) is kicking them out because they want to use it themselves; or so I’ve been told), so they’ve been building said building for forever now.
Today, the first day of the semester, we were expected to gather at the old building for one last time, and then we’d all walk to the new building (despite the fact that it’s quite literally on the other side of the city). The direct route would’ve taken us about twenty minutes, but we took a ridiculously circuitous one so as not to interfere with bus traffic, so it ended up taking well over an hour.

The new building itself, though. Holy fuck, it should be legal to shoot architects that crap.

It very obviously isn’t finished, first of all. By what I’ve seen, it needs at least another two months of work, though I admit I haven’t seen a lot, since the ventilation was out (and natural ventilation or windows that fucking open were apparently beyond them), and there wasn’t nearly enough oxygen to sustain all of us. I think some of the girls actually fainted.
None of the toilets work, many of the doors still need to be installed (though a lot of places that really need doors won’t get any, because heaven forbid students could have a quiet place to study that’s more modern), there’s concrete dust everywhere (though a lot of the walls are painted to give an indication of what floor you’re on (the bottom three are blood red (which is very conducive to avoiding school shootings, really), another one’s orange, and the top one is green, IIRC), which I’m pretty sure will have to be redone soon), and it would surprise me very much if any of the computer labs had actual computers in them.
We were all crammed into one of the “polyvalent” rooms for a welcoming speech, and when the person giving it (I still don’t know what it is she actually does) mentioned she was so relieved it was finally finished, the students (which I’m sure I’ve mentioned aren’t exactly known for their perceptiveness) burst into laughter and applauded. It’s that obviously unfinished.

But even if it were finished, the building is just complete and utter crap.
One of the reasons they gave us for the move is that the new building is much bigger (which is also why they’re cramming another department in there as well). As it turns out, they didn’t mean it has more rooms; in fact, it has fewer computer labs than the old one (which certainly didn’t have an excess of them).
It does, however, have much higher ceilings, which ruin the acoustics to the point where they had to install microphones in each room (though they don’t, obviously, work yet). It also has a lot more corridors and dead space, including a rather large (but inaccessible, and godawfully ugly) courtyard. Well, not so much courtyard as courtsteelgrid.

The adequate if not excessive parking space available behind the old building has been replaced with an underground bicycle dungeon (which requires student ID to enter, much like the building itself; they should have spent the money they wasted on that on a better architect). Cars and motorbikes are expected to rent parking space from the nearby hospital.
You can’t fucking make this stuff up.

And then there are the entertaining little details.
The various stairs, which consist of fuck-off big slabs of concrete stacked roughly on top of each other, vibrate visibly when people walk on them. The concrete slabs that are trying to pass as walls and floors are already cracked in places. The bike dungeon is very obviously going to flood at the first sign of rain, and the path down to it is slippery as fuck even when it’s dry.
And of course, the whole building is a giant fucking Faraday cage, so cell phone reception is non-existent. Which means that if you forget your student ID, you can’t even call someone inside to let you in.
And going back home to retrieve it is non-trivial, since it’s in the middle of fucking nowhere, unlike the old building, which was within walking distance of everything.

I was planning to move to Leuven next semester so it wouldn’t take a fucking hour to get to class every day, but that appears to be pointless, as the closest residential area is still way too far away to bother. It looks like I’m going to have to take the train to Leuven every day (which I already did), and then the bus from the train station to aforementioned hospital.

Expert fucking planning, KHL.
Maybe the next building could be designed by four-year-olds, and built on the fucking moon.