Worst Level Design in the game- the Choir room

[Nospheratu]

I find that it's good to have a mix of room designs. Different types create fear in different people.

A small corridor can make people feel trapped like they have no where to run.

A large open room can make people feel vulnerable like they have no place to hide if something were to see them.

I find both of them equally as scary.

This. I'm being serious here: after I tried to navigate that place for the first time and got killed by a brute somewhere in the maze of pillars, i had to take a 24 hour break before I was prepared to try again
When I played the game through for the 2. time with comments enabled, Frictional's method of using contrasts to create tension became fairly obvious, like the fountain hall area after the intense and claustrophobic chase scene is meant to calm the player down only for him/her to be more succeptible to further scares. In the case of the choir, up to then most of the scary stuff happened in small cramped spaces and dark corridors, so by then the players' minds have already adjusted to that ("A long and dark corridor? This will be a chase scene"), so this was probably meant as a place where in contrast to all previous ones you could move around freely but could also be attacked from anywhere, creating all new tension.
As for navigation - believe it or not, the thing with the pipes didn't even occur to me untill i heard it in the commentary (i can be stupid too sometimes). Like some other posters i just followed the walls and tried to keep my bearings in the red fog. In hindsight every place and occurance in Amnesia has it's meaning and purpouse; i for one liked and hated this place

[Monkeyballs25]

I thought the Choir was awesome because I dreaded having to go back there to recover an orb fragment I had missed earlier, and I know the Brute got me a couple times.