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In the last post, I mentioned that it may appear that the static uses in a floor plan are secondary to the circulation. This is true from square footage perspective, but perhaps more accurately, the design of a floor plan could be viewed as a dialog between the physical features and the circulation between the physical features. They each inform each other. The diagram in this post is intended to assist in illustrating this postulate. If all human-made features are removed from a floor plan analysis by studying a natural landscape, a couple obvious facts might be observed; that is, there are still physical features, and if people were to walk the landscape, they would walk somewhere, thus circulation. Essentially, there is no escaping a predetermined context and a predisposed circulation pattern within the context. In the diagram, I sketched a landscape that allowed for circulation through a natural landscape, from a start point to an end point (the solid line). For the sake of the diagram, the two rectangles, representing human-made structures, do not exist for the people walking the solid line path; these people are simply migrating through the particular portion of the natural landscape shown. The dots at the beginning and end of the line are to illustrate the start and destination points. Although this diagram represents a small portion of a greater landscape, and the solid line a part a greater circulation pattern, every single turn in a path can be seen as having a beginning and an end, or a starting point and a destination (this is an analytical tool I will discuss in more detail at a later time). The solid line might more or less represent how a trail might form. However, if the landscape were to change, based on human-made structures, this could greatly alter the general circulation in the area. The two rectangles, being structures, and the dashed line, being the circulation between these structures, illustrate this point. The structures may have been placed in the shown locations for a variety of reasons, including the possibility that the solid line became a well established egress route and that the buildings were required to be some distance from the route. So, the solid line was purely reactive to a natural context and, in turn, the placement of the structures responded to the circulation pattern defined by the solid line, which resulted in a new circulation pattern, and so on. It's impossible to escape history and nature in architecture. Even the orientation of your own home has a causal link from our hunter-gatherer days.