Destination Faith

Love those new elevators! Step in and get whooshed immediately to your destination floor with no stops in between!

If you’ve ever been at a convention in a skyscraping hotel or worked in an office on the 20th floor, you know that one of the most stressful parts of the day is getting into an elevator. You cram into the cattle chute at the elevator bank during rush hour, wait 10 minutes or more to finally squeeze into a space on one of the cars, only to find that nearly every button for every floor is lit up.

You and your new friends have to unpack yourselves at every stop to let off the lucky ones on the lower floors. By the time you reach your destination floor, you’ve become intimate enough with the other occupants to know what they had for breakfast and the state of their personal hygiene. You begin to wonder whether taking 20 flights of stairs would be a less strenuous emotional exercise. In a culture obsessed with time management, elevators can be a significant waste of time — but the times, they are a changin’.

An elevator evolution and revolution is happening in...