Long live the straight line

On Monday I was at the Building Centre for the judging of the IBP Awards. The judging was in the basement, which is now pretty hard to get too, because the front staircase has been shut. You have to go to the back of the building, down a kind of processional stair and then work your way forward again.
The reason is not hard to guess. Following that route takes you past many of the exhibitors' displays, and doubtless they were complaining before that they were not getting enough footfall.

So I can grasp the commercial argument, but it is really wrong. Buildings are meant to work - you are not meant to be directed off in a direction you did not want. Where else does this happen? At airports of course. When I was at Heathrow Terminal 3 recently, it was necessary to walk through an enormous maze of duty free before reaching a spot where you could sit down or have a cup of coffee. Again, the commercial imperative is overriding common sense. Terminal 3 is also interesting because half of the shops have ceased to be useful stuff (somewhere to buy a cheap holiday top, top up on sunscreen, buy a paperback) and become designer outlets. I guess this is a representation of the global trade in high end shopping.

When I got to Singapore a friend pointed out that the low-end visitor who has a few meals and drinks and maybe buys a present from the family is neither common nor the target audience. Instead most people are there to do SERIOUS shopping - thousands and thousands of pounds worth.
So we are not only in the kind of world we want, but we are not allowed to travel in straight lines either? It was good to see though that even in law-abiding Singapore, outside Marina Bay Sands people had created a 'desire line' through the vegetation to cross the road more directly. It had been fenced off but the damage had been done.

Buildings and landscapes need to serve the needs of users. We should not be manipulated either into travelling in ways we don't want, or to spending money we don't need to or can't afford. Long live the straight line.

Change the building not the behaviour

Today I was at the Building Centre and in the ladies' toilets (which each have their own washbasins in them) there was a sign above the loo paper saying 'Please don't use the toilet paper to dry your hands as it will run out. Please use the hand dryers. These toilets are not serviced regularly.'
What could the facilities team have learnt? They could have put more loo paper in the loos since it was obviously needed. Even better, they could have provided paper towels as they were what people wanted. I can't believe that this was a purely environmental decision, since the debate about paper towels vs hand dryers is a finely balanced one. I think it was just a matter of someone deciding how things should be and then trying to make people comply.
A good facilities manager - like a good architect designing a building - should try to work out what people want and try to give it to them, not issue instructions to make them change their behaviour. Of course sometimes you need people to change their behaviour (usually to conserve energy) but the most successful systems are designed in ways that people want to behave, or at least can be encouraged to behave, rather than going against their instincts. That is usually the cause of many of the buildings that perform so much more poorly than was predicted at the design stage.