Textured ceilings probably help hide things, but why the lines?
They’re precast concrete planks that span the width of the building. You’re looking at the seams between the planks.
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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Drop ceiling. That’s a panel and there’s 1-2 ft of space between it and the real ceiling. It’s much easier to run your utilities there than in the walls, and the panels make it easy to access.
It's not a suspended ceiling, it's a concrete slab. It's probably a prestressed concrete slab and the lines are the individual panels. It could be poured in place but I doubt it as that would require a ton of form work and be very slow and expensive.
A drop ceiling would have a little metal frame that the panel sits in.
Drop ceiling tiles are so fragile and ugly. Very laborious to install. Guests would do stupid things, like lift them up to snoop and put tuna cans up there and other nefarious stuff. The stack of tiles needed to outfit a hotel would be massive. To think drop ceilings are used in hotels defies logic.
With all the horror stories I heard about issues with leaking pipes or faulty electrical circuits requiring ceilings and walls to be torn down, the real question is why we don't do all the ceilings and walls like that.
This is rhe same reason I will never buy a house on slab: gotta hammer up the floor, fix, repour and refloor if you ever need those pipes down below.
So you want a basement on dirt? So you can't use the space for anything?
A lot of contemporary homes are built on hollow foundations with an accessible crawlspace for utilities.
Oh, crawl spaces are pretty rare further north because you need to be under the freezing level of the ground anyway so people have basements.
My goofy old house with built with the basement floor on trusses and a roughly chest high crawl space underneath. The main benefit is that you can run duct work under the floor and have full height ceilings. The drawbacks is that you have a wood floor in a basement with clay soil.
Interesting, the basement ceiling must be pretty far outside the ground otherwise that requires a pretty deep hole! Around here is usually 6' deep compared to ground level with ~2' above ground and a slab with only the main drain under the slab...
Depends on the side of the house. On the front, it's completely underground. About 20 feet from sill plate to floor. On the back side of the house, it's a basement walkout.
I'm up north too, but my house is so old it has a cellar foundation instead of a basement one.
Drywall is so cheap and easy, and leaks and failures so infrequent it doesn't make sense to have "easy access" to the interior of walls. Drywall is the easy access.
Certainly easier than plaster and lathe. Patching that shit is terrible.
Yes, this answer. Try hitting it (don't). Also reduces heating costs in old properties with high ceilings.
As many people commented, it's a gap between concrete slabs. it is more pronounced in the basement of my building, because they didn't try much at cover it.
Btw, I photographed it earlier to demonstrate the great work engineers done neatly guiding wiring and piping.
Edit: provided photo as a link
https://photos.app.goo.gl/RCsS9fJmFnp4XGbR9
You can open or replace this fake ceiling square by square as behind it you may find some electrical stuff that sometimes needs to be repaired. It’s also probably cheaper.
It’s kind of the same as the floor in data centers. If you’ve been in one, the floor is a fake floor made of square sort of plastic tiles. Below that you have the cold air that goes into the servers, AC and DC power, fire and water detectors, cables road etc. You need an easy access to those fake floors or ceiling for maintenance.
The floor is a fake floor...
Have also seen grated floors for the same reason. Like a fence that you walk on, so you can actually see the cable management below
The grates allow cool air to be forced up in front of racks. Unless your company cheaped out on datacenter construction, picked a room too small, didn't leave room for the ramp to get up to proper height without breaking code on the incline, and had to rig a half-height raised floor that barely left room for electric, let alone proper air flow, so there had to be a huge air handler on top of the unit to blow cold air in the wrong places. And then bought a generator that wasn't beefy enough to cover the AC, so every time the power went out it's a mad scramble to put rolling units in place to keep the room at ~90F.
And all of the brass thought themselves geniuses for saving a few dollars.
this is far too specific to be a hypothetical.
you sound like a Vietnam war vet recounting their tour.
thank you for your service!
Ya know, I bet there was some stupid financial decisions that went into it. I just thought it was cool that we could see the cable management cause it was done pretty well lmao
I wasn't there long enough to bother looking that deep into that kind of thing, but I'll probably think about it the next time I see some dumb shit like that lol
I think they're wall panels that fit together instead of real taped and bedded drywall. Probably makes it easier to replace if there's damage. Kind of like using carpet tiles instead of rolled wall-to-wall carpet.
ETA- something like this. https://trusscore.com/products/wall-and-ceilingboard.html
Because it’s cheap.
Because that's how they're made
You can tell by the way that it is.
One of the best ways to understand this is to imagine a multi-storey car park. Concrete exterior walls, support pillars and wide open spaces. Now imagine it being a hotel. All the internal walls and ceilings could go anywhere. What you need is sound/heat insulation and somewhere to hide all your pipes and cables.
Quick, clean and crisp-looking are big concerns from the constructor and operators’ point of view. Whatever methods and materials work best will tend to become industry standard.