LOS and the Tele

Encountered an interesting spatial issue awhile back, thought I might share (primarily because now I will have hit both architecture and xenobiology, much as the description of the blog claims).

So, our flat is rather linear in nature - the first room you enter is the so-called "middle room," which then can exit into the living room (now a bedroom), the balcony, or the kitchen. Due to the room's dimensions, the couch and the television are on opposite walls, with the doorway to the kitchen in-between.

This, obviously, becomes massively inconvenient anytime someone is watching the tele. Want to go to the bathroom, you have to break their focus for a moment.

In further contemplating this conundrum, it occurred to me that most dwellings are not designed with television-viewing in mind - which is kind of fascinating, given our culture's fascination with the damn thing. Hell, we've gotten to the point where wall-mounted televisions are becoming more and more common, which makes this LOS (line of sight) issue even more prevalent: a TV on a stand you can position somewhere convenient, but walls have a rather common nature of being at right angles to each other, which can cause furniture-placement issues.

Ideally, what you'd want is essentially something like a giant alcove, explicitly for television placement/viewing. The point of such a thing would be to ensure that there is nothing on the other side that folk want to get into - like a closet, or a balcony, or anything - and the only reason for someone being in the alcove is explicitly to use the tele.

I imagine that, if you examined dwellings with larger rooms, you'd see something like this happening in practice via furniture placement - people arrange furniture in such a way as to effectively build a wall somewhere in front of the tele, producing an effective alcove. I also imagine that a common problem with such artificial alcoves is that there is a reason that a person would want to cross through the LOS area, like a closet or something.

So yeah. Architect-folk, you should probably fix this in modern housing design. Just sayin'.