Do you know where the internet was started? Or when the first internet connection was made?
Well, neither did I until I started doing research for a new Student Creativity Center in a palm court breezeway underneath the Henry Samueli School of Engineering & Applied Sciences Boelter Hall in 2011. And what I found out inspired me to sneak a hidden message into the project.
When the campus architect at the time, Jeffrey Averill FAIA rejected my idea for an undulating facade with a strange mixture of punched openings, I pushed the idea to the bottom of a drawer and almost forgot about it. But I held on to if for some reason. And when the opportunity came last minute to try and tie in new floor tile within a decades old existing pattern (hint, it can’t be done, they’ll never match!), I dug down and pulled out my idea and was able to implement it into the floor tile pattern. And then I got busy on the next project and promptly forgot about it. Until several years later, the phone rang and there was a reporter from the UCLA Newsroom.
http://magazine.ucla.edu/exclusives/boelters-buried-secret/
https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/a-coded-message-hidden-in-floor-247232
Video of the discovery by a curious computer science major: https://youtu.be/fiVOr-SqeN8