Member-only story
There’s a True Path to Your Goals
But if you’re too busy planning, you won’t be able to see it
In 1997, famous architect Rem Koolhaas won a competition to design a campus center for the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. The building was meant to connect important, dispersed college functions and provide students with space to eat, relax, and take care of administrative tasks.
When Koolhaas first came to the site, all he found was a big patch of grass used as a parking lot. Between deciding where to put relevant offices and how to design the exterior, a debate about how to connect it all ensued: Where do we pave the walkways?
Koolhaas could have gone for straight connections between each destination. He could have built them around the grass. He could have cut diagonal paths across the parking lot. Koolhaas did none of those things. Instead, he said: “We won’t build any walkways. We’ll wait and see where people walk.”
For a while, all Koolhaas did was observe which paths people took to get from place to place. Then, he built hallways on top of those paths. He even made their width proportional to the number of students who walked there. The result is a highly unusual building with diagonal corridors — but it’s also highly efficient.
