If they use it as anything other than as left associative everything is their fault and they’re wrong.
goo.ne.jp also has:
建物などの、裏のほう。後ろのほう。背後。
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I don’t understand what the ほう adds to the meaning 
Couldn’t that simply indicate the direction?
Yeah, almost reads like saying ‘towards the back’ or ‘towards the rear’ or more literally sounding like ‘rearward’.
方 can also mean ‘side’, so it expands the area involved a little.
I don’t particularly want to argue about this one, and it’s true that ‘left associative’ certainly seems like the most common usage (just like the apostrophe S in English). However, ultimately, context and common phrases are what determines which blocks go together, and that’s why it’s not a good idea to use の chains when explaining technical things/new ideas. Here’s an example from my English-Japanese dictionary in which left associativity wasn’t respected:
私の何人かの友人
何人か clearly has to go with 友人, because 私の何人か isn’t a noun phrase. It’s true that 何人か isn’t a noun, which might mean this is a special case, but there are likely other examples in which context and common phrases suggest an interpretation that doesn’t involve the usual order of parsing. (I just can’t think of one involving nouns that doesn’t imvolve propers nouns like place names.)
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I know we derailed your post a bit but hopefully you got something good out of it. 
I often wish I knew more people in real life that I could chat with on topics such as this more and explore these rabbit holes. I always appreciate the chance to do so on this forum.
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Well, American English, perhaps. If you said “in the back of the building” to someone using Commonweath English, they’d be picturing this:
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That’s exactly why I decided to post my conundrum here. It’s an active, learning environment where we can all fall down the rabbit hole together - and hopefully address the original question along the way (which it really was, so all is good!).
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I thought it was clear enough that I was being facetious
Still, I think this is in the “I’ll think about it if it ever becomes a problem” camp…if you do think of/find a good example, it would be interesting to see it though.
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Haha. Maybe I was too tired to process jokes yesterday. It’s hard to tell since text doesn’t always capture our tone.
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