Building Problems Making Your Head Spin? Call the Professor

Something in your building is making people feel cocky-wobbly. So who you gonna call?

Professor James Albert Wise, director of the Center for Integrated Facilities Research at the F. E. Seidman School of Business, Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, Mich., that’s who.

He’s an environmental psychologist (Ph.D., University of Washington), a human-factors scientist.

He helps restaurant chains make their eateries more inviting. He advises the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on how power plant workers can cope with working underground.

He’s helping NASA prepare for “cultural diversity in an orbital habitat” when it sends a multinational crew into space for six months.

So, when the building manager at San Diego’s highest high-rise, the 34-story Symphony Towers, found that people were getting dizzy driving in and out of the parking garage, he called Wise.

The 7th Avenue entrance and the 8th Avenue exit are enclosed helixes, tight tunnels turned into vertical corkscrews. Parking is on floors 6 through 10; once you’re inside the helix, there’s no escape.

Wise flew to San Diego for a consultation. He got woozy.

“The first time I drove up the helix, I thought it was never going to end,” he said. “The inner ear has trouble adjusting to the confinement and the quick elevation. The colorless environment is very disorienting.”

His prescription: Brighter lighting (bright spaces seem larger), signs telling people to drive slower, and speed “dots” forcing drivers away from the hub. The faster and closer to the hub, the greater the G-force.

Symphony Towers management went for the lighting and the signs. It opted against the dots.

Still, Wise, 45, is pleased. He says building managers are more willing than architects to consult with environmental psychologists.

“Building managers have to actually live with the buildings the architects build.”

Mayor’s Not Mincing Words

Don’t seat San Marcos Mayor Lee Thibadeau next to Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy at your next dinner party.

Thibadeau is furious that McCarthy came to a recent Town Hall meeting in Carlsbad to pledge support for homeowners who are still fighting San Marcos’ plan to build a trash-to-energy plant.

Thibadeau has fired off a ballistic letter to McCarthy to “express my deepest disappointment in you” and accuse him of “political grandstanding.”

Here’s a sample: “You are nothing more than a crass political opportunist who has no integrity,” “pandering to a misinformed group of residents for pure political gain,” and “now I know why they have an ethical problem in Sacramento.”

McCarthy, who owns a condo in La Costa, is not responding.

But he will take his fight to the state Pollution Control Financing Authority to urge it not to underwrite the project.

Talk About Mixed Marriages!

Try one of these.

* E.T., have your parents call home.

A San Diego science writer named Anne Cardoza is sending out flyers asking anyone who has given birth to a child by an extraterrestrial to submit a 3,000-word, first-person account.

She’s compiling a book on breeding between humans and inhabitants of UFOs. She won’t pay for the stories but she promises confidentiality.

* Gov. George Deukmejian has trouble finding a spot on his dance card for Mayor Maureen O’Connor when the topic is drugs.

Last year it took months for him to find time to meet the mayor to talk about drug violence on the streets of San Diego. Now he has canceled a joint appearance with O’Connor on the “McNeil-Lehrer Report” to talk about funding the war on drugs.

The governor is said to be too busy on the state budget to do a satellite interview from his office. A bureaucrat will appear in his place.