Someone suggested in the comments that the other side of the door with the two foot drop might have another two foot drop, thus actually making some sort of sense. That’s pretty close! It turns out to be home to a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging system used by all the members of the Gulf Coast Consortium, a teaching and research collaborative formed in 2001 by Rice, the Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Houston, the University of Texas Health Science Center-Houston, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.
It’s a huge, heavy machine and back in 2004 they had to use a big crane to lower it into the space through the roof. Here’s a picture stolen from the Biochemistry and Cell Biology web site–if you look closely at the top of the photo, you can see the bottom of the door up in the middle of the wall.
That makes the sign on the outside even stranger. The drop inside is clearly much more than 2 feet!
I looked closely at the original picture. Either the ‘1’ fell off or someone with a marker updated to ’12 foot’ drop.
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Looks like the braille says 12 foot.
So I wonder if the other side says “2 foot drop”.
Very interesting! We discussed the previous post in a meeting, and I cannot wait to share the second part. Thanks, Melissa!
Wow. In the interior picture, that’s pretty clearly a floor slab under the door, painted pale green. There must have been a “first floor” and this is part of the “basement” that must have been opened up to make a two story space, hence the orphan door. I wonder if the machine itself was the reason for the removal of the “first floor?”
That is indeed the other side of the door, but the NMR in this photo is a smaller, older cousin to the big one that was installed in 2004. I was there the day they opened the roof and lowered the new one into place, and this one was already in place. The bigger one would be located out-of-frame to the right of this one. It’s much larger.