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.
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.
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.
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 love floor plans that aren’t centered around a TV. fuck your TV. try talking to people.
Eh people are more connected now than ever. I know what my aunt is up to and text her all the time. No need for a conversation nook to catch up with her life when I’m up to date.
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
