In my sketch, I attempted a bird’s-eye view of the Harvard campus from the Harvard Law School to the athletic facilities across the river. Being a second-semester freshman, I was fairly confident with my judgment of the Yard, the Science Center Plaza, and the general area around Mass Ave and Harvard Square. However, I have little more than rudimentary knowledge about locations and streets that I am not required to visit often; areas such as the River houses, the Quad, the athletic facilities across the Charles, and the Law School are not quite on my radar. A comparison of my sketch to a map confirmed these suspicions that my drawing was accurate in some places and less accurate in others. For me, I believe my sketch suggests that I relate to the city as an area of both work and living. As a college student, I essentially work where I live. Thus, I’m more aware of the area around where I both work and live – that is, around the Yard and Science Center Plaza. On the other hand, my lack of knowledge about other areas shows that I do not appreciate the parts of the city where I do not either work or live. So, as opposed to viewing the city in an exploratory manner (as perhaps a tourist would), I view it as both a workplace and an abode.
Upon looking at a map of the actual area on Google Maps, I found that my memory didn’t fail me too much; the relative placement of most of the buildings was fairly accurate so the overall product didn’t look entirely different. However, and this is something I struggled with while actually sketching, I clearly have no sense of roads or streets and failed to fully incorporate them into my sketch. The fact that I couldn’t remember roads and similar divisions but could remember the buildings isn’t very surprising to me – even when I am driving or walking somewhere, I have always directed myself in terms of landmarks (“I pass building X and keep going until I reach building Y”). In addition, drawing to scale was very difficult and it was impossible to consider how large and spaced out the buildings were relative to each other; I eventually focused solely on remembering their relative placement. Along with roads and streets, the biggest discrepancy I noticed between the sketch and the map was the amount of space that existed between buildings. I treat roads and streets as a means to get somewhere, so they don’t figure prominently in my mind; I also don’t remember lawns and social areas but, ironically, I would remember the lack thereof if they weren’t there.
My sketch representation of the Harvard campus differs dramatically as distance from the campus center increases. I began by drawing the Yard and Tercentary Theater meticulously, given that it’s the part of Harvard I am most familiar with, and the area that I feel is most central to student and academic life. As you move away from the yard, you can see more gridlike patterns – not necessarily because the reality is a grid, but because I had to rely on roads rather than buildings/landmarks to recreate the campus. The scale also increases as accuracy decreases, as I had to become more arbitrary with my drawings. One notable point about my sketch compared to an actual map is that I drew the quad as a separate bubble. Because I mostly take the shuttle to and from the quad, I don’t have a good grasp on the orientation of the quad relative to the Yard/River. I also see it as an entirely separate location from the rest of the campus, which is why I encased it in a figurative and literal bubble. Another distinguishing feature of my map is that I chose to only draw Harvard buildings. I felt that if I drew non-Harvard residential and commercial buildings, it would clutter the sketch with meaningless rectangles and draw focus from the more important structures.