Window Project & The Comcast Center

Yesterday morning, while I cleaned the bathrooms and did laundry, Andy painted around the windows he had replaced in the kitchen. He thought he was matching the paint but either the original paint was greatly faded or he took the wrong can to the store for matching. The new paint is brighter than what was on the walls, so he's thinking now he'll have to repaint the whole kitchen. It's never simple, is it???

The finishing touches on the kitchen window project...
We finished up with our work by 11:00, then drove over to center city Philadelphia for a tour of the Comcast Center. I have a friend at church who works for a big-wig top executive of Comcast. Several weeks ago she had invited Andy and I to join her for lunch at her work and she'd give us a tour of the building. She knows Christy, so I asked her if it would be ok for Christy and the kids to join us and she said it was. So we met Christy at the parking lot right next to the Comcast building, then walked the 1/2 block to the largest building in Philadelphia.
We actually got there before Christy did because she ran into traffic (surprise, surprise). So while we were waiting for her, Andy and I sat in the outdoor park and enjoyed the outdoors.
The Comcast Center is a skyscraper in center city Philadelphia. The 58 story, 974 foot tower is the tallest building in Philadelphia and the fifteenth tallest in the US. It is built over Suburban Station. My friend who works there can take the train from NJ all the way to about a block from where she works, then in winter or rainy weather, can walk the entire block underground. The building is an amazing structure and we learned some interesting tidbits as we toured the building. This building has actually become the third most visited place in Philadelphia for tourists.

Just the lobby itself was quite fascinating. This "man and his son" are looking up at all the possible walks of life that the son could go into.
Then there is the video. The Comcast Experience is a 25.4 feet tall, 83.3 feet wide, 2,000 square feet high-definition LED screen situated on a wall in the winter garden. The screen is composed of 7.8 million, 4.66mm pitch pixels housed in 6,771 LED modules. The video runs eighteen hours each day. The content of the video includes panoramic views of Philadelphia historic sites, images of space, dancers, acrobats and actors moving around a background designed to mimic wood paneling of the walls of the lobby.
The rest of the building is interesting, too. Our friend took us to the Sprout floor where the PBS show originates. The kids sitting in Barney's chair:
We also saw the studio where interviews were being recorded for the Comcast channel.
There are 4 sets of elevators in the building. Most people have to go from floor 1-12 in the first set of elevators, then you have to switch over to another set that goes another set of floors, until you get to where you want to go. However, our friend, whose office is on the 55th floor, is authorized to go in the special elevator that goes from ground floor to the 56th floor in 43 seconds! Talk about tummy ticklers and ears popping! Whew!

The building also has a "green" reputation. The lobby is not air conditioned or heated, but has vents in the floor that has recycled air from either the outside or underground. Our friend said the lobby is always cold. The building was designed to use 40 percent less water than a typical office building, and the plaza was designed to reduce heat-island effect from the pavement by 70 percent. Reducing air conditioning and lighting costs, the low-emissivity glass curtain wall blocks 60 percent of heat while allowing 70 percent of the sun's light inside.

Then to top it off, we had lunch high up in the clouds - literally. The clouds rolled in as we were eating our lunch in the unbelievable, anything you want to eat cafeteria. At one point the clouds were so thick we couldn't even see a block away. Then they blew away and we could see the streets below and surrounding buildings again.

This was really a fun day and I hope we can do it again. We were told that on a clear day you can see all the way to the Delaware Memorial Bridge. We were also told that their video show in December is awesome.