Intelligent Architect story: Urban Legend?

Factual Questions
21

The problem I have with the theory is that not all of the initial grassy area is going to be the same. There are going to be some low spots that will be the last to dry out after a rain. People will avoid those areas, even if they lie in what would be the nominal paths. So the path may get worn in a sub-optimal line just for that reason.

I think for the most part, you know where the pedestrian traffic is going to flow and can put down the sidewalks with relative confidence. Later, if the masses prove that you left out a spot, you can pave it over.

22

Let’s take a typical real world example.

Take an academic quadrangle. Six buildings. The two along each side have two entrances each. There are passageways to the rest of the campus in between those buildings. There are access points at each of the four corners of the quad. That’s sixteen entrances and exits. Throw in the need for trees, plantings, benches, maybe a central statue of the founder.

That’s almost as bad as creating a connection route for an airline. You don’t want to make direct connections between each and every entrance because that would look awful and would be wasteful of materials. (Not to mention added maintenance, snow plowing, etc.)

You don’t need to wait years to see what the most used connectors will be. It will quickly become apparent.

Actually, the best solution is a compromise between letting the students walk wherever they want and a few imposing pathways that force traffic to certain pathways.

23

I am at work and don’t have access to my copy of “A Pattern Language” and “Timeless way of Building,” but the OP sounds like the Oregon Experiment . Check the links to Christopher Alexander. I believe this is the source of the Urban Legend since it may have confused his philosophy with an actual project.

24

This makes the path OPTIMAL for the terrain. Those places that are avoided would have puddles or ice patches if paved.

It is just this sort of detail that doesn’t show well on a blueprint that makes the concept better than “just putting some thought into it”. Somebody doing a drawing will make decisions based first on what is easiest to draw (square corners) and next on what appeals to thier sense of the asthetic. An archetect sitting in front of a CAD package in an heated/ air conditioned office is going to use a much different though process than a student, running late for class, carrying 25# of books (YES if it’s a commuter campus) on a 20 degree day.

And it’s not just where to put the sidewalks, it’s how wide to make them as well. High traffic areas will get worn wider as people pass each other.

25

Landscape architects call these paths “desire lines”. (By the way, wouldn’t that make a great title for a romantic novel or movie where the protagonists are landscape architects?"

26

Of course the obvious solution here is to pave over the entire quad, throw a hunk of torn up steel in the middle and declare,

“It iz aaaahhhtttt! Archuitexture in zee most seevere style!”

27

The opposite tack would be to pave the entire works, then put a thin layer of paint on it. After 2 years, those areas where the paint has not worn off are not being used and can be jackhammered out to put in grass.

28

You can tell alot about a person by how they use sidewalks.

Some keep on them at all costs, even if it means going way out of the way.
Some seem to avoid the sidewalks just the same.
Some cut the corners
And of course the unclassafiable meanderors, somewere-in-betweens, and curcumstanial departures.
I think that if a study was done of the sidewalks that have used mentioned method it would find that these types of people would still exist and the same amount of off sidewalk traffic would occur.

Some people just cant be hurded, and some want to.

29

Slightly off topic… I used to get a kick out of walking down the left side of the paths at my University (in the US). Oncoming people are so ingrained to pass on the left that they would walk off the path onto the grass to pass on my left instead of just staying on the path and passing me on my right. Buncha lemmings…

30

In my 8th grade Social Studies class, it was pointed out that Washington, DC and Indianapolis, IN were both designed from a blank sheet of paper. Both had a right-angle grid of streets, with diagonal spokes to the center thrown in for effeciency. This was in contrast to Boston, which my teacher said was laid out along existing cow paths. In the cow-path-laid Boston, he said, it’s much harder to get around and figure out where you are.

My teacher, of course, may have been spouting bull-path. :wink:

31

Or maybe they pass you to make you aware that you should be walking on the right? I have passed on the left shoulder on otherwise empty freeways just to get my point across to left-lane idiots that they shouldn’t be there.

32

I would consider anyone who did this to be no more than a dangerous maniac. That you were doing it to make a point would never occur to me. As a general rule, doing something illegal never makes a point except a bad one about yourself.

AskNott, Washington was certainly laid out with a deliberate plan. The diagonals were not so much for efficiency, though, as to create sightways and display areas for the proposed major buildings and grand monuments that a proper capital city should have.

Angled grids are far more efficient. That’s why New York City has a jumble of small streets at the southern end of Manhattan and the grid imposed above 14th St. Broadway was an existing merchant road and was integrated into the design.

I’m not as familiar with Indianapolis, but I’ll note that as far back as 1940 Norman Bel Geddes was using the huge central monument with the multitude of streets entering into that traffic circle as a prime example of how older cities were inefficiently laid out for the age of the automobile.

Radially laid-out cities, such as Rochester and Buffalo, make it extremely difficult to get from one side of the city to the other. While they made some sense back in the days when downtown was king they are hopelessly inefficient today with dispersed centers of trade and industry. And the odd angles at which streets meet make both for bad traffic movement and bad real estate. Washington had to redo all those weird intersections with over- and underpasses to allow traffic to move.

Few cities ever get laid out from scratch, although the exception are usually for newly created capitals, as with Washington, Canberra, Brasilia, Chandigarh, New Delhi and others. Older central cities either need to have huge parts torn up to create boulevards, as with Paris, or freeways, as with Philadelphia. Robert Moses almost drove an expressway across lower Manhattan but a coalition of neighborhood groups stood up to him and forced him to abandon that plan.

There really aren’t any good solutions to city design in a world of too many automobiles. The western cities with huge amounts of available land and the ability to make all their streets eight lanes or so have the easiest time, but all traffic designers know that the more lanes you put down the more cars you attract. I’d still rather drive down the wide roads of California than the three lane avenues of Philadelphia, though.

33

Yup, I think he was. He omitted the fact that nearly every European city is laid out on non-planned roads. And are successful, and don’t result in lots of people getting lost (except for American tourists :stuck_out_tongue: )

34

Occam’s razor suggests to me that this probably occurs, but without prior planning. “Dang, look at that, they’ve worn out the Zoysia over there… guess we might as well plant some concrete.”

35

Yes, this is an interesting point. I remember when I was at uni (large leafy and grassy campus), my buddies and I chose paths that were where the sun was shining.

I remember one of us commented in winter that we should take the sunny path, to keep warm.

36

I wish they’d done this at my university. It seems like they laid out the sidewalks just to create pretty geometric forms. I always walk the shortest distance between two points, and find myself on a sidewalk only about half the time it seems like. There’s worn-down grass everywhere.

37

Yeah. When I attended Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, a large new building was built (the Rec Center), and right beside it, a large lawn was put in. If you were on campus, you might walk across this lawn to get off campus, or you might walk across it to get to the health center. Even though the shortest paths would have been two seperate straight lines, people followed a single line most of the way, then branched off when they had to pick a direction. Every time I walked by there, I thought, “they should have put a y-shaped sidewalk right here.” The following year, they did. Hard to say whether they waited a year to put the sidewalk in on purpose or not.

It’s also interesting to note that the worn path (and the subsequently added sidewalk) didn’t even follow straight lines – for example, they curved to keep a comfortable distance from a tree, even though the tree wasn’t actually in the path.

38

This is one of those things I thought of myself and felt quite smug about coming up with myself till I read this thread :stuck_out_tongue:

Sort of like thinking Austin Healey would be a good Hitch Hikers name for someone instead of Ford Prefect, till I found out an English rugby player used it too :wink:

39

While I was at the Univ. of Oregon, I remarked to a graduate student in landscape architecture that people who plan walkways should do exactly what the OP describes. He told me that was how Thomas Jefferson laid out the walkways at the University of Virginia.

40

I don’t know what was in the Circle when Indy was first built, but the monument is to the veterans and dead of the Civil War many years later. One north-south street and one east-west street meet at the circle, not a multitude. The diagonals don’t go all the way to the center.

Bel Geddes’s opinion of traffic circles may have been fashionable in 1940, but several cities are returning to the roundabout as a more efficient intersection. It takes some getting used to, but it’s self-regulating, and it works.

Wedge-shaped intersections do make for pointy buildings, but architects have learned to use the dramatic shape to their advantage. One of the earliest skyscrapers was built on a flat-iron shaped lot.