Desire Lines

Several of us have noticed a couple of interesting phenomena about the buildings on the Princeton campus, namely that 1) they are curiously devoid of any identification, either attached to the buildings themselves or by signage and that 2) there is usually an opening, often arched, somewhere on the facade of each building which allows one to pass through and continue on one's walk, whichever direction one happens to be heading to. The first seems to convey a kind of covert message to the effect that "if you don't know the names of the buildings, maybe you don't belong here."  It has perhaps an unintended effect of intimidating campus visitors who are not properly initiated.  

Desire Line

The second phenomenon which we observed has to do with the ingenious way the buildings and their interconnected paths are laid out on the campus.  As long as one has a sense, however vague, of the direction one needs to go, there seems to be a path already laid out, through a series of openings on buildings one after another, which will lead one to one's destination.  More often than not, the paths take a diagonal direction, instead of a parallel or perpendicular one, with respect to the buildings around them.  


As buildings are usually laid out in an orthogonal fashion, the diagonal line is the shortest distance between any two corners in a rectangle.  If you'd look closely on any campus ground, you'd likely see "unplanned" paths on the grass or ground, worn thin and smooth by students, collectively but without coordination, crisscrossing and taking the shortest and the most direct route from building to building between classes. This phenomenon is referred to as "desire lines", the traces of natural pedestrian patterns on the ground - something I learned from a Landscape Design course at UF, the truth of which has been born out over and over again by my own observation.  An experienced landscape architect will often come back to the site where a new building has been erected after a lapse of some time to find the traces of desire lines and then make adjustment to the pedestrian paths to conform to those lines.  What's ingenious about Princeton's campus plan is that all the desire lines seem to have already been paved, as if laid out that way in the first place. But, more than likely, some campus planners had gotten wise to the phenomenon of desire lines during its 265 years of history and paved over all the dirt paths worn in the grass.