History & local legend
Architect’s Leap was the student nickname for an open stairwell in the southeast corner of Carnegie Mellon’s Wean Hall, near the former architecture studios. A darkly comic rhyme about an unworkable design project ran down its landings, line by line. Students said that erased words would return, along with an outline of a body at the bottom.
In a March 1990 article for The Tartan, Charles Sabatos described the stairwell’s traditions and the objects students supposedly dropped through it, including a concrete block and French fries frozen in liquid nitrogen. He could personally account for one object: his own economics textbook. It landed one floor short of the bottom and acquired skid marks on page 71.
The formerly open space was later blocked off.
