story about architect designing sidewalks

That's a little unlilkely, tt's likley that the university had paths and then
at some point decided to path where students have taken short cuts.

It's probably much quoted as the ideal in architecture but not something
anyone is going to agree on in practice.

EdHill at 2007-9-5 >

Sounds apocryphal. The story makes the point that one of the critical parts of design is figuring out how people will actually use the product. However, an architect who actually says what the architect in the story said is just being lazy. You don't need to analyze every single instance of a problem in order to develop a general set of guidelines to help solve it. True, people might walk slightly different paths at this one location, but generally speaking if you know enough about sidewalks and enough about people, you can put together a solution that will work 99% of the time.

duckthing at 2007-9-5 >