I’m American and I often think we do things wrong…
but not this. First floor on the SECOND floor. It’s just wrong.
Right, the first floor after you ascend from the… Initial floor, which is on the ground, QED.
We think of it as the first floor that is above the level of the ground - the planet supplies ground level, we just count every level we put above it.
Exactly. In most countries, you reason that you never need to count floors unless you are going up or down. If you are walking up stairs, each floor you go past, you count it: F1, F2, F3, etc. If you are walking down stairs, you count each floor you go past: B1, B2, B3, etc.
Americans think about it more like a cake. Each “story” or “floor” is a ~3m or 4m, floor-to-ceiling, architectural layer. You don’t look at a 3-layer cake and say “that cake has a ground layer, then a first layer and a second layer” you say “that cake has three layers”.
So I’m on the top floor of a 2 story house (floor 1 in British). You’re on the ground floor. Would you say that I’m “up on the first floor” if someone asked where I was? That seems very weird to me.
Essentially, yes. All of the surface of planet earth is ground level to us, whether a building exists there or not. You would then be on the first (man made) floor above the ground. Even a tent has a ground floor. Think of the ground as zero. Anything above counts upwards. Anything below downwards.
Agreed. Go outside and count the concentric rings that go upwards. Do you ever start with 0 counting anything else in existence??? No it’s 1 or L but #2 is 2.
You are completely wrong.
Imagine assigning to each floor a whole number.
Every time you go down a floor, the number should be decremented by 1, every time you go up a floor the number should be incremented by 1.
In order to get symmetry, floor 0 should be the ground floor - not floor 1. What maniac would assign floor 0 to the first basement floor?
Yes, but I was talking about assigning numbers from a logical perspective, not a conventional one.
Also, why is it called B1 for the first basement floor but not E1 (for elevated) for the floor above ground floor?
Don’t you see how that’s such an obviously ugly and mathematically unsatisfying retrofit to make your shit work?
B2 B1 1 2 3
vs
-2 -1 0 1 2
And what the hell do you even do in a situation where 0 is at street level but -1 opens on a backyard or something. It’s clearly not a basement, but it’s clearly not the ground floor either.
Or do you never build an elevator in such buildings in order not to trigger massive cognitive dissonance?
EDIT: Holy shit there is another layer to this hypocrisy cake. Americans swear up and down that they have to write “12/11” because they say “12th of September”, but their floor notation is literally “B1” for “First Basement”. Clearly the only rule they follow is that they’ll do whatever is least logical and convenient just to piss off everyone who is forced to work with them.
In order to get symmetry, floor 0 should be the ground floor
Floor 0 is “not in the building”, nobody calls first/ground “0” in reality
Then, we apply your own logic of adding a floor on going up to include “going in” and vice versa for “going out” and we get why the US does it the way we do
I don’t get what you’re saying. Why wouldn’t floor 0 be in the building if we started assigning numbers to floors?
As someone who will die on the hill that USC/Imperial is worse than (or the same as) metric in every single way:
Yeah, the British are idiots, and we Australians also use their confusing system too. I hate it.
The ground level is the first level you walk into, this should be 1.
Expressed another way:
— 2
Level 2: between floor (the actual floor) (1,2)
— 1
Level 1: (0,1)
— 0, The ground
Level B1: (-1,0)
— -1
Etc
In the international system (the one Americans use) you are concerned where your head is.
The British system wants to know where your feet are.
The American (and many other countries) system makes way more sense.
The ground floor is the first floor.
This makes as much sense as those people that defend Fahrenheit by saying “30 degrees can’t be warm, its cold!” - your own reference is to what you’re used to calling it.
Celsius is no more scientific than Fahrenheit, as it’s also based on water at sea level, not some universal measurement.
So it’s no more valid than F.
Kelvin is based on absolute zero, at least.
It’s the first floor above the ground level (or the first floor that you have to start calling a separate name, because if everything is single level you don’t need to specify a floor).
