[MOC] Air Traffic Control tower

[AColtsFan]

I'm designing a medium-size commercial airport at minifig scale--it'll probably be so big that I don't know if I'll ever be able to fully build it out of real bricks (if for no other reason than where would I put it?  and don't even think about full-scale runways and taxiways and outbuildings, maintenance facilities, satellite terminals, etc.at their typical locations ), but I'm hoping to at least be able to build parts of it.  Anyway, over the last couple of days I've started working on the control tower and I've got (a "draft," at least, of) the first floor of the tower done and I'm hoping for feedback.  Basically, my idea is that the first floor of the tower is a small museum to the history of the airport, so you've got a model of a larger airplane and a model of a smaller airplane (the pentagonal plate, with the tab serving as the empennage) in the bottom-right corner), as well as a replica of a radio tower that might have once been at the airport and a display case in the middle of the floor.  There's also a (single-occupant) public restroom, of course, as well as an elevator (can't get a good look at it in these images, but you can see the wheel that I will eventually tie a string-on-a-winch to to make the elevator properly hoistable) and staircase.

I got held up for the longest time trying to figure out how the elevator would get up to the tower cab without compromising the 360-degree (or 2π radians for my pure-mathematics friends) (or 400 gradians for my civil engineering and surveying friends) visibility that you need at the top.  In the process of searching for how actual control towers have solved this problem, I discovered that it's commonplace around the world for accessibility regulations to exempt the top two floors of an airport control tower (cab + floor below cab) from elevator requirements, presumably for this exact reason--the cab, and also the floor below the cab since that's where the elevator machinery would need to be in order to keep the machinery from obstructing visibility in the cab too.  It seems to be one of those situations where you have to make a tradeoff between two not-really-great-or-desirable alternatives (ideally you want the full building to be accessible to everyone if for no other reason than because ideally the job opportunities should be accessible to everyone, but having an elevator shaft running to the top compromises the visibility that is crucial to the tower's safety-critical mission, and until someone comes up with a way to combine the two there's an unpleasant choice to make)..

I wonder if it might be a bit too busy.  I might need to move the radio structure model closer to the center because as it is it's going to be awfully close to the second floor walkway (which the inverted slope bricks will be supporting) as it is, which will also necessitate moving the display case.  Thoughts on that or other issues?

 

In this next picture you'll get a better side-view.  I haven't filled in the exterior walls to flush with the top of the interior walls, but you get the idea of the basic shape and look.

The second floor will have a walkway but otherwise be open-air to the first floor, in order to permit elevated viewing of the larger museum artifacts.  The subsequent floors up to the cab will be offices, as is typical in the boxy style of ATCT I'm going for.

Interior lighting is going to be an issue.  I didn't include windows since they're often not a thing on ATC towers below the cabs, plus the location of the restroom + the stairwell structure means that there'd be no way to place them with any sort of symmetry, and I was worried that'd look odd, especially on a structure that is almost defined by its exterior rotational symmetry.  If I ever build it for real I can probably rig up some small LED lights, but it'd be artificial.

Comments/suggestions/thoughts?

Edited June 8, 2022 by AColtsFan