5

Second time visitor:

In the previous posts (1 - 4), I have been illustrating the natural movement of an individual through a featureless room that is square in plan, has a single exit and entry, and which is about 15' x 15' in area with entries and exits that are about 5' - 8' wide. The spaces leading to the rooms and the spaces beyond the exits are thought to be completely wide and open. In fact, the rooms can be thought of as standing alone in a flat featureless expanse of space; except that for some reason an individual must travel through the space to reach their destination.

With these diagrams I have been illustrating the basic principals of movement through a small room. I have used a small room, not necessarily because they are the most illustrative of walking patterns, but instead because a small room is familiar and thus can be useful as the seed for an understanding of indiduals' complex relationship with space.

As the concepts I have been illustrating are bear the kernel of a rational and theoretical approach to our relationship to space, all of the points in the first paragraph of this post are essential to the results presented in the previous diagrams. Those points act as variables in a mathematical equation, and in this post I introduce one of the variables that I have so far not discussed, but which underlies all of the previous diagrams and which will be relevant to the future posts for the foreseeable future: The second time visitor.

The second time visitor is, for all intensive purposes, a person who enters and/ or passes through a space for the second time. The idea behind this phrase is not intended to literally mean that it applies only to individuals who are traveling through a space for the second time. It is referring to a pedestrian who is neither completely unfamiliar with a space nor who has developed a personal familiarity with the space. It is my assumption that the second time visitor is illustrative of the most intuitive movement through, and between spaces. It is an attempt to reduce movement to an abstract notion by stripping various biases that might influence someone's path of travel. A first time visitor might find themselves distracted by novelties within a space, or with other cultural conventions, to accurately depict someone flowing naturally through a space. On the other hand, someone who is very familiar with a space or series of adjoining spaces may travel by learned routes and shortcuts.

The point of diagramming movement according to the most unbiased individual is to aid in developing spaces that consciously take advantage of our natural tendencies. Although, clever as we are (we can determine more efficient or effective ways of walking through our built environment than what may come intuitively), there are many reasons to have spaces that take into account natural and intuitive movement.