The People

The past week or so, speaking about tactics, and how the architect could use them in the design process has been particularly interesting to me. The campus we practically live on has many paved pathways, maintained stairs, and clear directions for movement drawn throughout its many green spaces and between its buildings. Yet every day, when I make the walk from my car to studio I avoid those paths at all costs and instead follow the path of least resistance, avoiding stairs, and instead walking up the hill next to them, following the cow-paths engraved into the grass by hundreds of other students following the diagonals across these spaces.

This has made it ever clearer to me how a site plan, or an egress route, or a simple circulation diagram may seem simple, and fairly intuitive to lay out, but in reality, the human mind is so endlessly complex and often contradicting, that even ourselves as the ones who lay out these paths often don't follow them.