The Existential Dread of False Ceilings 

Could you make a video about the backrooms ? Especially the Level 0 or lobby the yellowish beige or flower wallpaper the suburbs and the pool rooms which are either a Part of the backrooms or exist independent from them

As a Nebula subscriber, could you do a summary and review of Branko Mitrovic’s excellent book _Architectural Principles in the Age of Fraud_ ?

@stewarthicks Great video! FYI: Drop ceiling return plenum is the source of a LOT of building problems.

No

Plenum is not the name of the space above the ceiling unless it's being used as an HVAC return. If the return is ducted all the way to the drop ceiling the space cannot be called a plenum.

I really hate hospitals ceilings and everything about hospital's interior it makes the process worse

The nurses couldn't supply you with sunglasses??

I spent nearly 3 months in traction, 40 years ago. For a little while it was a game to count the holes in the trimmed tiles at the perimeter. But it really went off the rails when I factored all the whole tiles and added up the ones I'd counted! I forget the number today, but the nurses weren't impressed that I'd figured it out in my head. 😂

@@jimurrata6785 I am so sorry for the 3 months in purgatory you experienced.

​@@godknows4454What do you think is wrong with hospitals and how do you want them to look? I'm not saying hospitals look perfect but I like that they look clean.

Probably got taken down because letting kids paint them makes them go from "fire resistant" to "fire yes please" and/or because they bounce off less light and the space gets darker, not an entirely good idea despite how much more child friendly the space might have looked.

Damn, when the teacher left, the soul of the class left with them.

I like what I think that lesson may have been about.

@@freedomfighter22222 Better not paint those 1 Hour and 2 Hour fire walls then. While acoustical ceiling tiles do have a light reflectance value, most building codes for commercial buildings in America requires a minimum luminance. Whether the sun is shining to bounce off those tiles or not. They provide this luminance with lights. Really helps out when it gets dark.

@@SoberAddiction The paint your painter uses from a hardware store that follows regulatory codes and the paint your school gets for children to play with have very different fire classifications. For the latter it is a lot more important that children doesn't get cancer from breathing in the fumes than it is that their drawings can't catch fire easily. "most building codes for commercial buildings in America requires a minimum luminance" Which is achieved by calculations based on reflective surfaces expected in the rooms, the amount light fixtures installed is adjusted according to the ceiling, walls, floor and other surfaces reflective values. When the electrical engineer says you need x amount of lamps he says so based on the ceiling tiles being the reflective surface it says it will be in the building plans, not based on what color som teacher might allow to be painted on it in 20 years.

I mean, yes and no. Fluorescent was the first "energy efficient" lights to come out, and was considered progressive during their era; You used fluorescent because it was the 'new technology that didn't heat up the room'. Drop ceilings naturally were a candidate for one because drop ceilings were used vastly across the states in multiple ways -- from homes (so many homes had drop ceilings, especially for the working class) and even more so for office spaces that were renovated. The benefits of drop ceiling was the accessibility to new technology, like romex electrical, cable for phone, and especially for basic tasks, like changing a florescent tube or cleaning. To be entirely fair with this, the reason why "drop ceilings get a bad name" is because they were used for poor people. And instead of acknowledging "hey, this was a vital important history to remember", it's like whitewashing it (literally) because they forgot that gypsum was incredibly costs, expensive, and required plaster on ceilings, which wasn't just expensive but difficult. This only changed post 1970's to 1980's, where lighter-weight building material started hitting shelves and technology changed over time. Meanwhile, for the corporate and companies who used dropceilings, the use-case for them increased, rather than decreased. From the creation of Central Air (hvac) and various technologies, such as later rj11 internet, to rj45 90's-00's ethernet, all the way to what you would consider as a modern company today all use drop ceilings just because accessibility between ceilings is incredibly important for new data runs, new electrical runs, access to cleanout and supply/feed for hvac, and various other reasons. In closing, the "why it gets a bad wrap" isn't lighting. It's typically the association with a persons experience, which gravitates back to "if they had a drop ceiling, it's possible they couldn't afford anything more and thus the experience was probably bad". In modern days, drop ceilings are associated with, truthfully, any non-warehouse enterprise, as they're super convenient for a multitude of reasons, and most finished basements that "have a ceiling" utilize drop ceilings just because they can still access vital, important parts of their house -- such as water supply lines, gas lines, the panel box & romex, data lines, low voltage lines, etc. I'd have to argue that the only "bad wrap" that exists, is the experience intertwined with why people dislike it. "bad hospital visit" and they only look at the ceiling, while they think "where are the normal ceilings". Meanwhile, I not only grew up in houses with only drop ceilings, I replaced them in my own house, and worked with them at work running data lines in the past. truth be told, lighting and, especially fluorescent lighting, wasn't a bad association with them. I'd argue a lot of the negative association of them is due to bad experiences by people and them associating their time with something. Give it 20 more years and it'll be "why does red oak furniture give a feeling of existential dread".

@@itsJoshW doesn't change the FACT that fluerescent lights light is shitty

@@diablo.the.cheaterit’s better CRI and light balance than lots of cheap LEDs in offices. It depends on the quality more than the technology

@@lawrencejob 100%! Modern high efficiency low CRI LEDs are soo bad!

@@diablo.the.cheater other than the full spectrum ones that acurealty matched the color of natural daylight

offices aren't loud, cielings are loud

Yes, it's great if you considered about functionality and price. Now I got flat ceiling. Great to look at. But if I got a new house, I would put drop ceiling up for the whole house. For now with flat ceiling, as my dad was a technician and can fix everything imaginable in the house, and I'm EE grad. It's real hard when I need to run more ethernet cable/electrical wire somewhere. Or when I need to cut out a hole to touch up the roof countless of time. And when I want to redesign the ceiling lighting, I just can't without leaving some hole in the ceiling. When there's pipe leak, that patch of swamp just stays there forever, because, yes, I just can't without tearing down the whole room. And when the wiring looks bad, you just don't see it. Live your life happily. Bare ceiling with all those cool black metal pipe is very nice to look at. But in my country, it cost a lot. And everything needs to mount on the solid concrete. Which I hated, for maintenance. If I got drop ceiling, everything would be so easy and so cheap to replace and maintain.

I guess there's a channel rebranding in order: "Not just bikes and drop ceilings" 🤗

Thats probabky why they're frowned upon. Its a bit brutalist, and practical above all else. Usually its the building itself you tie into it all. It's crazy to see everything drop ceilings hide, like the ductwork, pipes, and electrical.

Nah. I'd take them out and have a couple of feet more headroom, less hiding spaces for vermin, and less dust 😌👌 .

This is the same way our engineering firm does it. Equally important is the sound abortion panels they added. we are lucky to have an acoustic engineer who dialed it in.

@@---l--- Is that what those grey rectangular panels hanging beneath everything on wires are?

I studied in a institute that had a mix. The classrooms had drop ceilings but the hallways didn't.

​@@---l---that's a hell of a typo lol

That "industrial" look was all the rage again a few years ago. I think it's stupid.

To this day, whenever I'm in a space with dim blue-green lighting reminiscent of the color grading of the interior shots in 'Aliens,' it makes part of my brain uneasy.

I was thinking of the scene in Jurassic Park when they were running from raptors that were jumping up through the drop ceiling.

This was the reference I waited the whole video for 😁

Warden Harold Andrews disappears through the drop ceiling in Alien³.

Yes , but in Jurassic Park they escaped from the raptors in the drop ceiling .

I love good quality hardwood, staining and a clear coat is the most they need. Staining is optional.

I binge watch home reno shows sometimes, especially those of historical or just even 'boring' old buildings. I live for the moments when an ugly floor is stripped to reveal original hard wood or tile, or when a drop ceiling is removed to reveal architectural elements designed for beauty or at least natural elements like wood beams. I can't imagine anyone choosing to add drop ceilings now! It even drives me crazy when people paint over natural wood....

Im an electrician and i install all the lights and equipment above these ceilings, i love putting a nice lighting system in but these are really dreadful that lights they use are cheap and they are frustrating to install

Jesus.. You Americans really have it rough on so many levels. Even drop ceiling are ten times worse in the US...

But just think that, even though the wood is hidden, it is still just hidden ready to be rediscovered

Thank you for your comment. I had to have a look. There's the close attention to the human element. Architecture really can solve a lot of problems if only more people could appreciate and read these fine stone books. Far better than feeling like a consumable in a plastic cookie box.

Huh

It is nice until the dust collects on the open pipes

@@PowerControl I think Jan's feeling was that the dust would collect on the pipes and ducts just as much in a plenum as out in the open and would have to be cleaned in any case.

Appreciated this insight, any buildings of his that retain this style that you can think of? Wondering if I can catch glimpses via photographs

Have you ever been in a casino. Most casinos are raised floors. I always assumed they used them. My local casino added on. When you walked from the old to new you went down a ramp about 18” then across a floor were restaurants were and back up a ramp. I later saw them working and an employee confirmed. The old space was 18” and the new 12”. Now it made sense why Atlantic City casinos had a couple steps before you entered the game room.

There’s a lot of “fake” floors at my work. I work in broadcast tv so the studio buildings have a lot of cables and equipment under the flooring. They’re just big tiles that can be picked up easily so repairs can be done. They’re super loud to walk on too because they shift with every step.

Ha, I'm old enough to have called them computer floors.

Starwars

I noticed them in Server and Electrical rooms on oil rigs. Makes sense since it's a lot tidier and easier to get to and install cables below all the devices.

thats facts, also the whole way of thinking that leads to building cheap, uniform, purely functional spaces with barely any human dimension

I agree that removing the drop ceiling would not fix the building. A large floor office is just dehumanizing, no matter whether in cubicles or the modern open spaces. People are not made for this environment and there is only one way to fix it: make smaller floor plans and smaller offices for 1-4 persons with real walls.

The ceilings themselves are too low, in most cases. They'd feel like white cages without these, except with a jumble of wires, pipes, and HVAC in sight

This is a good point but I disagree that it does not make much of a difference. The color temperature of lighting has a subconscious mental impact. Doing something as simple as changing the lighting in a home can completely transform the space.

@@Secretlyanothername They'd be low anyhow. Because they want to fit as many floors in as possible, so they can fit in as many people as possible. And for cred, people think it's a lot more impressive to have 50 floors than 40, even if they are buildings of the same overall height, and even if each floor of the 50 floor building is qualitatively worse than the ones in the 40 story building. [Edit: I just reread your comment and this is what you said already lol. Sorry for repeating you!] That said, I have noticed some new office building construction where I live that actually have some decent height between the floors.

Literally "throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks" but with sharp pencils and ceiling tiles.

did that but in calc lmao

You probably ate a lot of glue too.

​@@mondo_burrito In AP Chem? They'd have access to far more worrying substances than glue.

Everyone did that

You could make the grid much smaller if the panels clipped in. There wouldn't be any metal showing, just a thin line. Or you could make panels longer and offset them like subway tiles.

They need a better system of putting tiles in the grid, putting a tile back is the most annoying thing about the ceilings when you work in them.

everything you mentioned is available now, businesses go for low cost solutions. every color, every size, with grid showing, without grid showing, curved, vaulted, wood, metal or cloth. they even has cloud systems that just hide certain equipment.

They tried 5x5 in the 70s with (optional) matching wall panels that locked into the grid (for easy office reconfigurations) and the lights came in several styles too including a "coffered" variant where a 2x2 light troffer was raised into an angled coffer and it looked pretty darn cool. Fell out of style by the early 80s. They were popular in the "open plan" concept schools in the 70s that had very large rooms, the larger size helped the scale.

I co-own a pet grooming shop, and one of the key things we did outfitting the space for our use was to swap the standard ceiling tiles out for *slightly* more expensive plastic ones because moisture. It looks about 1000% better with that one change.

If I were a hospital I would have patients who stay overnight have the light dim when the doctor isn't in the office, or at least have a dimmable light switch.

I think it's more of a subconscious dislike rather than an explicit one.

No one "hates drop ceilings" because no one "cares" enough to have hate for them. But they still a thing that is bound to the dule repetitive opressive system. You even see them in Portal, as the parth towards a humanless world controlled by AI

The intro to the video confused me, do people really care that much about drop ceilings?

@@JamEngulfer No, I don't think many people actually care at all

hate would be a strong word for me, but i really appreciate any place where i can see the technic above/behind/under me, especially if it's build with aesthetics in mind

As an IT guy, I prefer cloud ceilings, so much easier to access and I can throw a bunch of equipment up on top of it that I'm sure it's not rated for :D

@@JohnVance in the book "How Buildings Learn" Stewart Brand says lowered ceilings are junk compared to raised floors. That book was published thirty years ago and these days most data centers have raised floors so the book was prophetic about this. The problem is that raised floors are ugly and expensive, but functionally they are superior.

@@error-xn7hn Oh yeah, raised floors are the bees knees, it would be interesting to see them deployed with more attention to aesthetics outside of the data center.

@@error-xn7hn raised floors are a nightmare in real life. anything spilled on the floor will just leak down and never be cleaned, mold will grow quickly in these unventilated areas. any new installs or maintenance will require moving alot of furniture. it also requires barricades around any opening for fall hazards while work is being done

I agree. They are frequently featured as the "money shot" in architectural publication photos when featuring a building, they can be made very interesting, all depends on the designer/architect.

It's even funnier to me as I was just watching that movie last night.

And Madmen and The Office and The Matrix etc.

Okay but the stapler is red?

I’m a commercial designer in Chicago … I remove all the drop ceilings I can 😅

Yeah, that's a pretty common aesthetic downtown.

Now there's someone who knows where the meat comes from!

@@canary_inthecoalmine Thank you!

@@cherylm2C6671 I have a lot of meat

Content generator.

This should be the only thing anyone is talking about lol

I'm an electrician apprentice as well and totally agree with you.

What sort of gross? Can you describe? I'm curious.

​@@Boodlumsdust, dead mice, mouse droppings. Old insulation. Sometimes you find tools which is nice

I think there was a video somewhere about a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant that blew up due to dust collecting in the drop ceiling. They did the rest of the cleaning perfectly, but in the ceiling and inaccessible it's not brought to mind.

​@@Nuka_Gaming, oh. Do you wear an N95 mask when you are working up there. There are nasty viral diseases that you can get from inhaling the dust from dried mouse urine.

Restaurants in the past, and in many other countries, have booths, partitions, carpets, and/or separate rooms, to control sound. I too really dislike the currently popular bus station design of restaurants (even very expensive ones), with rows of tables in a big room (like an old schoolroom), with the sound reflecting off the floor, walls, and ceiling, it's hard to even hear people at your table speaking.

So say we all

Worked for a company that assembled cubicles. Acres and acres of cubicles! OMG, it was soul crushing after a while (but the pay was good if you did piecework)

Go work in a mine. Or literally any other hard job. And tell us more about your tough life in your office

Utilitarianism incarnate.

Its a bit unfair to compare our modern ceilings to ceilings that was made for a tiny aristocracy when there was no middle class.

same could be said for carpet, paint and trim. none of these last long term that is why most companies remodel every so many years

Not as big a problem once people stopped smoking inside. Used to be we'd build a corporate office in 1984 and by 1990 the ceiling grid was orange from all the cigarette smoke. All the smoke alarms too, especially the ones under skylights because I guess all the smoke went up into there.

​@@viktorakhmedov3442 I was about to leave the same comment. When replacing ceiling tiles, the tiles above a smoker's desk would be covered with that brown sticky tar.

Grew up having a drop ceiling in our basement. Tiles are nearly identical. Replacing them is trivial because they haven't discolored one bit, and it was a very easy way for my (at the time) broke-ass parents to have a finished basement. Also, I can't honestly think of the last time I thought the drop ceiling would fall on me. Probably never, tbh. The ENTIRE ceiling may be heavy, but the metal trim is quite thin and those panels don't weigh much. I suppose if you had a full 2x2 panel that was just a light (common in offices, not homes) that might get a bit heavy, but again drop ceilings are relatively stable regardless.

@@EnderSpy007 Virtually zero danger of anything falling, the grid parts themselves are light aluminum, and they’re held up by thick steel struts that are pinned to the concrete slab above. Light units are made of aluminum and are pretty light too, and are doubly secured by additional struts to the slab. In an earthquake some ceiling tiles might fall, but they are very light weight. When remodeling an old space, sometimes the grid is repainted, which is quick and easy to do. Tiles of course are quick and easy to replace. I’m a fan of drop ceilings. Had one in our kitchen, and installed one in the bathroom as well, with translucent white panels for tiles, and LED lighting above, so the light is diffused through the ceiling and sort of coming from everywhere. And it’s super easy to lift the tiles to work on anything above, or to wash the tiles themselves like once a year. Much quicker and easier than a drywall ceiling.

One of the buildings on my college campus was like that, I used to spend most of my time in that building between classes looking up.

Our office is like that. Also part of the floor is polished concrete. It’s pretty and has a hipster industrial vibe to it, but is also quite noisy. Some managers complain that people are being too noisy because, heaven forbid, they should laugh in the echo chamber.

A local diner near me is located in the same location where there was previously an electronics goods store which had the typical drop ceiling. The diner, however, upon moving in and remodelling , eschewed the drop ceiling. Instead is an exposed, higher ceiling. Suspended lights hanging, exposed air-con ducting and all. The whole upper space including the ducting is painted black. I love the vibe, it's spacious and cosy at the same time, like a converted warehouse to apartment type of refurb.

A local diner near me is located in the same location where there was previously an electronics goods store which had the typical drop ceiling. The diner, however, upon moving in and remodelling , eschewed the drop ceiling. Instead is an exposed, higher ceiling. Suspended lights hanging, exposed air-con ducting and all. The whole upper space including the ducting is painted black. I love the vibe, it's spacious and cosy at the same time, like a converted warehouse to apartment type of refurb.

@@razeezar a local diner is located in the same location... :D

@@frida507 A local diner was - Yeah, I don't know why my original comment posted twice either 🤘

@@razeezar 😀

I worked somewhere that required two-factor authentication to get into the computers (card and password.) If you forgot to take your card out of the computer, sometimes people would hide it somewhere - including tucked into the edge of a ceiling panel.

@@Eloraurora I worked as a computer operator decades ago. The locking system failed, and I HAD to get inside the computer room. I stacked furniture outside, removed a ceiling tile in the hallway, pulled up a tile in the computer room, and climbed over. So much for secure rooms.

@@BlankBrain That's hilarious. Ours was just pranking people when they got slack about data security measures, but you got your own little Mission Impossible!

@@Eloraurora I once worked for an insurance company that took security very seriously. They had a manned security station at the entrance to IT and the computer room. All of their fiber optic cables to the main building and other buildings went up one wall in the computer room in an area about three feet wide. Behind the bare cables was drywall. On the other side of the drywall was drywall in a low-use public public area with a tunnel to a public parking garage. Fifteen seconds with a chainsaw would have been disastrous.

Haha, I had the same gig while in high school. That crumbling fiberglass down the back of the shirt is something I won't forget.

I hate them too, putting the tiles back is a pain in the rear, then the dust that comes out when you take a tile down is horrible since that tile most likely didn't move in like 20 years.

It certainly looks more interesting. But you are now heating and cooling the entire volume of the space up to the deck. An acoustical ceiling doesn't provide much R value but it does provide a thermal break. And of course painting everything above the line of the ceiling is more expense than a drop ceiling - and if you leave it completely open then you have to choose alternative light fixtures which are always more expensive than lay-in fixtures, you have to use duct that's attractive to look at, and paint that etc etc The cost advantage of a drop ceiling assures that will be using them for a loooong time

No, you suck.

I always started with the hole boards hoping someone else would do the cuts 😂😂

When I was a kid I took some art classes at a church with a designated "art classroom." The drop-ceiling tiles were painted each year by kids in the church youth group and I was wild with envy. I had a basement bedroom with a hideous drop ceiling of my own, and the idea of painting the panels and making them beautiful was the absolute dream.

The monotonous grid of white ceiling tiles is a reflection of the company’s culture. There is an expression in the United States: “lipstick on a pig.”

Fully agree. It's baffling to me how one of the biggest economy of the world decided that these hideous drop ceilings are the end all be all solution.

Exposed beams are bad Feng Shui too, so double skippy, lol

Oh, yes…I’ve seen that type.

I swear this is why I get constant allergies and sinus infections living in an apartment with a drop ceiling! My partner gets lung infections more now too. The panels are badly done, with a hole somewhere in the building as an added bonus, so when it’s windy they flop around. This is the dustiest place I’ve ever lived. Plus, they put it in our BATHROOM. I don’t even wanna think about what the humidity has done up there…

Each panel would have cost about $5.00 for a new one. That says a lot about school maintenance.

In the US, rectangular ducts are most common in plenums (more cross-sectional area = more CFM (air volume) = higher ceilings) and round ducts are often used for exposed ceiling applications for aesthetics.

Yes a church and an office isn't all that comparable, but those were the only kinds of spaces with false ceilings in the early days. Admin buildings wouldn't have had them.

@@stewarthicks ooooh I see now. As I wrote that comment, I was thinking about how those churches did have false ceilings themselves, and maybe that was your intended point. Though, I did just rewatch that section of the video, and I'm not so sure that it conveys this point. Anyway I love your videos please don't think I'm a hater lol

@@ModernAtomX Also acoustic screening which hid the secrets of vault architecture. Massed bells can be fierce.

The idea that offices are utility spaces is what makes them so dehumanizing. The generic ceiling tiles are the architectural representation of that mindset.

The ANZ Gothic Bank in Melbourne was a working space, but also magnificent. The degradation of work into something uninspiring and monotonous is a bad development for society. We want people to feel that their job is important, and that they are valued by society for what they do. Giving them mediocre and oppressive spaces to work in can erode their motivation.

Well, _The_ _Complex_ does have a drop ceiling, after all. 🫥

Go into a Walmart, and then go into a Target (not one of the rare Walmarts with a ceiling or even rarer Targets without one), you'll definitely appreciate the difference. Target still puts ceilings in their stores.

Well no one would know if it was hostile. lol jk

Possibly. Which Iteration? Pre 1992, or after 1992 when Worthington and Armstrong got together to make the system we use now?

@@SoberAddiction Don Brown

Well i invented the adhesive for post-it notes

Acoustics, fire rating, concealment/access of more mundane building systems, creating a return air space, supporting electrical and electronic equipment. There are even grid systems that have conductors inside so that you can attach low-voltage devices to the grid for power rather than needing to wire to the device. They do a lot of things well, and while the basic white tile on a 2x4 pattern with drop-in troffer lights is bland and creates cave-like aesthetics with poor lighting design, I think people would like buildings without them a whole lot less. They probably keep costs down as well.

When I was a kid, my family attended church in a lovely older building. It had a vaulted ceiling with interesting moulding that zig-zagged across it. I'd get bored and gazed up at it for hours fantasizing it was some sort of freeway system for bugs, or something... I'm sorry, what were you saying?

My personal experience is just me, and not the rest of the population, but I felt freer and more relaxed and more open in classrooms with high ceilings. Those new classrooms with their low drop ceilings felt oppressive and squashing. I made better grades in the older classrooms. But then I'm left handed and turned out to be autistic, so of course my experience in those spaces was in contrast to the majority of the population. As for highly decorated ceilings, no matter how high they are, they feel oppressive and burdensome much like ca low dropped ceiling, plainer is better.

Half the kids are playing CSGO anywho lol

The iconic Swingline stapler from Office Space is red, not orange, while we're being nitpicky. I own one.

@@needamuffin Me too :)

@@needamuffin Swingline didn't produce a red stapler originally, but because of the film, demand got so high they started making them. The props for the film were painted.

This is a good point! Nobody sees plain white bathroom tiling and thinks "the monotonous repetitive design of this wall makes me feel oppressed." The association with dullness and oppression likely comes more from experience, and also just cultural iconography, than it does intrinsically from this style of drop ceiling.

Humans generally enjoy and need STIMULUS psychologically. There is a reason why so many people forced to live this sort of boring, monotonous, totally controlled existence begin to exhibit stereotypic behaviors similar to animals in captivity.

That same pattern recognition is the reason we associate the quiet of an office space and the repetition of ceiling tiles oppressive. We subconsciously associate the environments they appear in with their physical properties.

@@quilynn but "monotonous repetitive design" is not on anyones wish lists. sure when its part of sometinge bigger, but when its in 9/10 places you go then it becomes really oppresseve. Just adding a color or having another form than squire would work.

I think that you also had the chance to experience newly installed drop ceilings. That school ceiling, after 20 or even 40 years of not being maintained is really horrible. But as the video said, people don't hate drop ceilings, we are just tired of the run down white acoustic panels. Everyone's seen beautiful fresh takes on that technology.

@@wiiza4ever Oh, you are quite correct about the contrast between new and old drop ceilings. I have been a teacher since the mid-1980s and a slight majority of my classrooms have had drop ceilings. And yeah, a drop ceiling tile that has begun to droop so far that you can see up into the whatever-that-p-word-was-that-he-used is pretty disgusting. Yet a single tile can be replaced in minutes, just standing on a chair or short ladder. Contrast that to a school that I taught at which had been built shortly after WW I. The ceilings itself looked like an old fitted bedsheet used by an incontinent invalid, with stains all over it. The plaster was cracking and occasionally pieces would fall off. *No* one was going to fix that without a work order that would require a team of men working for several days over the summer. Lots of money to fix, so it never got done. I'll still take the drop ceiling over the stained echo chamber.

​@@BS-vx8dg for me, school was a prison. Do you get it now?

I wonder if you might have had a problem with the drop ceiling that was installed in Linderman Library at Lehigh University. In a gorgeous neo-romantic building dating from 1877, on the second floor, in was what is today the rare book room, which, when built, had a massive (functional) fireplace, stunning chandelier, and beautiful ceiling with intricate detailing and stone carvings, everything above 10 feet off the floor was completely covered up by a drop ceiling for nearly 45 years (roughly 1943 to 1986, if I remember correctly), all in the name of “energy efficiency.” As far as using drop ceilings to turn basement dungeons into nice family rooms, drywall attached to the bottoms of the floor joists and painted white would have had an even more dramatic effect. The only advantage of the drop ceiling in that circumstance is slightly lower materials and installation costs, and the drywall solution gives more headroom. Drop ceilings certainly have their uses, and often are an excellent solution, especially when designed for from the beginning, but to claim that they are “never a problem” is to ignore many atrocious ceilings.

Alternatively, you just don't have the same worldview as most people.

Oh yeah, and the residential applications in the 70s loved that black grid and white panels. At least in rural Michigan.

Don't forget that the ageing hippies were full shag too.