Aerial view of the Limbopad at Eindhoven University.

After the previous post on Wear and Tear and Use I couldn't let go of the concept of footpaths being worn out of the grass by users. It turns out the concept is known as desire paths, a term described by French scientist, philosopher and poet Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space:

A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.

There even is a complete Flickr pool of desire path photos.

The Limbo Path
Though I did not find any traces of an architect deliberately using the concept, I did run into an example that comes close. A well known version of a desire path in Dutch academics is Einhoven's Limbo Path. At the technical university in Eindhoven many students from the Dutch region of Limburg are enroled, who are often called Limbo's. This group of students was/is notorious for not moving to Eindhoven, but rather commuting back and forth to Limburg. The shortest path between the university and the campus was over a lawn and over time a path emerged, which became known as the LimboPath. Interestingly, the university has institutionalized the path by paving it with concrete (see picture below) and has even put up an official sign saying 'Limbopad'.