Design, failures of

Ok, I'm not an architect, though I have an amateurs love and understanding of some of what's involved (which is to say I obsess over my Frank Lloyd Wright books, Gerry books and Chris' Dwell magazines). I also figure that as the ultimate user of architecture (even if it's as a passing pedestrian) I'm entitled to an opinion on it.

So here's the thing, any building that needs an area around it roped of with yellow safety tape due to falling ice and snow has failed completely, in the most important way possible: user safety.

If you're designing for Montreal, a city that at least 5 months of winter a year and you can't figure out a way to make sure that you don't build a ramp for snow and ice that feeds nicely onto the heads of passersby, you're not really thinking about where your work is going. Worse still, if you're a architect who builds public buildings and you still manage to build them with ice and snow chutes that drop said frozen precipitation in the area of the front door... well let's just say that the entrance of the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion of the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal is not Moshe Safdie at his very best.