Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 11, 1992                   TAG: 9203110094
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IF YOU WANT QUIET, LOBBY IS A TURKEY

He became addicted to the turkeys, he said. He would drive his tractor out into a great turkey pasture, hauling a load of feed, and turn off the engine.

He would stand up on the broad tractor seat, spread his arms and scream, at the top of his lungs: "TURKEYS! DO YOU LOVE ME?"

Toms and hens responded to his voice, thousands of birds in the flock of white feathers stretching toward the horizons gobbling and cackling. If he used his imagination just so, closed his eyes and ignored the smell, Joe could pretend to be the idol of millions of people in the middle of a sea of fans.

It was enough to keep Joe on the farm.

It's been a while since I lost touch with Joe. I wish I could find him now. Joe would enjoy the new Norfolk Southern building at the corner of Franklin and Williamson roads in Roanoke.

He could leave his turkeys at home, too.

For the feeling of power that the right sounds can give you, nothing beats the twin lobbies just inside the street-level doors of the NS building.

The ceilings in the lobbies are domed. Sound rises into the great catcher's-mitts ceilings and bounces around before departing for ever after.

A conversation beneath the dome lasts long after you've left the room, the sounds bouncing around, off the walls, off the floor and back up to the dome. A whisper travels far. Be warned: The lobbies are a lousy place for intimate secrets: The world will know all.

When the crush of railroad workers leaves the building - from 5 to 5:02 p.m. - their heels reverberate in the lobbies until about midnight.

Stand beneath the salad-bowl chandeliers in the lobbies, turn your chin toward heaven and talk. Your voice takes on a resonance.

I am Walter Cronkite. I am Winston Churchill. I am accepting my party's nomination for president of the United States.

Stand in the NS lobby and you sound important, even though you are not. It worked for me. It would work for Joe. The lobbies do not smell like live turkeys.

Joe Nuzzaco designed the building for Norfolk Southern. He works in Atlanta, and he hasn't visited Roanoke in two or three months.

The last time Nuzzaco was here, there was plywood on the floor. The echoes were there, but not too pronounced.

"It's not anything you intentionally plan on," he said. "If I were a mathematician, I guess I could have calculated it."

The domes were built over the lobbies for purely aesthetic purposes, he said.

"It happens with a dome. Sound travels," said Joe - the architect Joe, not the turkey Joe. "You can't tell the intensity until it's built."

It's intense. It's a good place to sing - makes you sound like Tony Bennett or Aretha Franklin, or both if you can get the echo to work with you.

It's a good place to sound important.

Better even than a tractor seat in a pasture full of turkeys.