Martin Hall, home of EWU’s psychology department, is the beating heart of any psychology major’s day. Through cramped, dated tiled hallways to classrooms built for elementary school students and seemingly randomly placed professor offices, students are free to amble around past empty classrooms and old-school desk-chairs in search of their classrooms. Despite this, a sizable amount of Martin Hall’s square footage is dedicated to collecting dust.
Completed in 1937, the building replaced the city of Cheney’s training school dedicated to the education of rural teachers. Completely remodeled in 1980, the fashion of the times is hidden away in Martin Hall’s closed doors and shadowed corners.
The majority of the building, conjoined with Williamson Hall’s education department, sports the ever-changing interiority of any older teaching building: the yellowing, tiled floors, the outdated bathroom paint, and the acoustical semi-damaged ceilings. Martin Hall’s dated tiles leading through hallways that twist into separate hallways that twist into randomly segmented rooms stem from years of renovations on inconsistent funding and ever-changing faculty presences..
Through brown halls and two-turns, one of three doors to Martin Hall’s most pristine relic sits, hidden and disused, laced with stale air and a stale silence: the fishbowl room is a memorial to the 1980s memory of psychological innovation, obsolete and nearly unusable against its impracticality as a classroom.
“The idea, originally, was to help teach the mental health counseling program,” said Nick Jackson, a psychology professor who started working at EWU in August of 1996. “To teach them mock counseling principles.”
The fishbowl is too both big and too small to be used for a standard class. Giant beige-and-yellow dividers sit rusting in their ceiling tracks, in anticipation of a professor cutting their class in two for a smaller observation of the counseling room behind the one-way mirrors. Orange carpeting brackets the stepped floors, with the orange-and-green chairs and small desks awaiting the filtering of students to fill in the cramped stairs.
In its heyday, the fishbowl would’ve been the center of a live counselling observation for psychology students. In its present, the fishbowl is overlooked by every student on their way to their classrooms.
