Provided they live in an M.C. Escher dimension

Unlike houses, though, aliens would have trouble re-creating extraterrestial apartments buildings based on the terrestrial representations we’ve shown them. For instance, I could never figure out how the architects of Monica’s apartment on Friends drew up the floor plan without being masters of origami. Radiating out clockwise from the living room, you had the eat-in kitchen, which led to the apartment’s front door; the bathroom, wich despite its cavernous dimensious somehow failed to encroach into the back of Monica’s kitchen cabinets; the balcony, which in a token nod to bohemianism was accessible only through a window instead of fancy French doors; the two bedrooms, both of which were as big as the kitchen spilling over into each other; and a live studio audience of several hundred people. Actually, now that I think about it, aliens are probably the only ones who could reconstruct such a space, provided they live in an M.C. Escher dimension where the laws of Euclidean geometry do not apply.

uit: A TV guide to life : how I learned everything I needed to know from watching television - Jeff Alexander


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