In a smaller application of the same principle, I once ran a retail gift shop in a long, narrow location with the entry at one end. We put the checkout in the middle of one long wall to guard the open stairway to basement storage. We directed traffic into and out of the store along a walkway defined by closed shelving on one side and the wall on the other. From there we had tall shelves of product laid in a "fan" around the checkout station. The arrangement led to more "browsing" and impulse purchases and a person at the checkout stand could easily watch all parts (but a few) of the store. This arrangement worked out very well for us, and our patrons seemed to like it. If we had to move a lot of people in a hurry, the "pivot point" could become a bottleneck, but the doorway would have been a bottleneck anyway. Luckily, we never had such an event.

Walt Disney's original plans for his "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow" was a circular city and suburbs, with transportation corridors laid out in "wheel and spoke" fashion rather than rectilinear.

Design and placement of rectangular buildings in a rectilinear array are relatively easy to plan/layout, simple to execute and amenable to mass-construction and modular building. I suspect the reason so many temporary worksites, including POW camps, are laid out that way is that initial costs are lower than the "fan" design and that little thought was used in planning for efficient jailer labor, particularly using military or contracted employees paid from the public (taxpayer) trough.

Thanks, I haven't thought of EPCOT before. I'll go check its design peculiarities now.

As for POW works, I don't know whether Sachsenhausen was erected by POW hands - but Kottbus was. This one was a second camp (first being in Crossen on the Oder), where POW labor was used, as before that., the prevailing German doctrine was just keeping them out of eyesight and preventing revolts, real or suspected, by heavy observation.

I wonder if many POW camps were minimalist re-creations of military camps of their day? See Fort Custer (MI) as a gridded example that has been around since early 20th century. Hence the grid may have been a self-replicating design from Roman times onwards? Certainly the grid is not the most efficient for purposes of incarceration (or for purposes others have noted). Witness Bentham's design for prisons that the British used widely throughout the British Empire -- see the prisons in Insein (Myanmar) and Meerut (India) as examples.

I also wonder if at least some of U.S. Civil War POW camps -- e.g., Andersonville -- weren't rather chaotically arranged, or became chaotic in layout as they became overcrowded death traps.

As an aside, if memory serves, a number of Civil War POW camps were not well fenced. Hence, their layout with a "dead line" -- the line beyond which, if POWs strayed, they would be shot. Apparently this must have been the case for the Confederate POW camp on the south side of Chicago, since POWs strayed with some frequency beyond the "dead line" (not enforced by their captors) to ask for food from Chicago residents because POW fare was so poor. Chicagoans apparently responded generously, and POWs would return to the camp knowing escape to the south was impossible. See Cronon's magisterial work on Chicago, but it unfortunately does not have many maps.

True, a military summer camp, like in Döberitz or Wünsdorf in Berlin area, or Krasnoe Selo next to St.Petersburg, where both of the Great War armies would held their parade-like excercises, would also have a checkerboard pattern as a layout. What's more, many a camp began with tents, instead of semi-permanent huts.

Yet thinking of functionality when it comes to a prison camp, this well-known layout would be so obviously inadequate! Do you think it is all because of mechanistic thinking of quartermasters?

I wouldn't compare abovesaid Döberitz, etc. to a castrum though, for no T-shaped road crossing can be found there, but rather a parade on one side, and no noteworthy end on the other. The idea of "growing into chaos" is definitely worth of further examination, in the field of my interest, this may be a case of Kottbus I or Crossen I camps. Thanks!

You have clearly thought about these things more than I. I wouldn't lay all at the doorstep of mechanistic quartermasters. But it is possible that such camps were laid out in "absence of mind" -- that is, the question of layout was not an issue for intentional decision-making. Best!