Upon comparing my sketch with the official campus map, I was pleasantly surprised by its (relative) accuracy - perhaps a sign that, as a senior, I've been around here too long. There are a few things, however, that I noted based on my sketch. One is how the geography of campus (and of Boston in general) is so defined by the curvature of the Charles River. The river skews everything, and since Harvard's campus is located on a bend in the river, certain things are closer than they appear, and some farther. I failed to represent this very well in my map; for instance, some Houses along the river that appear in a straight line are not that way in real life. The fact that the city is laid out in relation to the river also makes it difficult to tell where the cardinal directions are. Normally, when I spend enough time in a place, I know where north, south, east, and west are, but because of the river, I have to re-orient myself, and have never quite been able to get my bearings in Boston. Another thing that was difficult to portray on the map were the streets of Harvard Square. While much of the Square is laid out in a rough grid, the one-way streets, strange intersections, traffic circles (like near the T stop), and other strange features made it difficult to draw an accurate map.
In my sketches, I sought to portray and accentuate the contrasts between Copley Place, the Prudential Center, and Newbury Street in terms of their roles as public spaces. I chose to create a schematic map of Copley Place to emphasize its claustrophobic feel. I showed how the mall’s only entrances are at its corners, and how it consists essentially of a long, snaking walkway. As I entered the mall at Dartmouth and Stuart Street and walked through, I was struck by Copley Place’s closed atmosphere, underscored by its dark tile floors, elevation changes (the effect of which is that the path is not revealed until you continue to follow it) and relatively low foam ceilings. There is a central atrium where more light comes in, but this plaza is deserted except for a waterfall, and doesn’t serve as a central gathering place. I color-coded the different areas of the mall on my map. I crossed the skybridge to the Prudential Center, which featured glass ceilings (allowing sunlight in), clear signage, and light-colored tile flooring that provided a warmer feeling. The centralized plaza where each shopping arcade converges has kiosks, seating, and is more bustling. And while Prudential Center represents a more cohesive and orderly public space than Copley Place, both pale in comparison to Newbury Street. In my sketch, I depicted the wide sidewalks, orderly pedestrian traffic flow, and store patios that make Newbury an effective commercial and public space. I attempted to capture the street’s signature brick storefronts, wrought-iron fences, and bay windows. I shaded the brick-covered store patios in red to contrast them with the sidewalk on which pedestrians could pass by. Finally, I highlighted the street lamps and trees that further enhance Newbury’s friendliness to pedestrians. Compared to the discrete Copley Place and Prudential Center malls, Newbury is open, with pedestrians free to enter at any block and navigate freely from block to block, and from the Commonwealth Ave promenade past Newbury to Copley Square on the other side.
This process of sketching Harvard’s Map was sketching down the streets that I frequently use first. The athletic complex all the way up to Harvard Square thought JFK street was fairly easy as it were to draw the riverside dorms and Quincy Street. That makes sense because those are the streets that I use to most to travel to class and to the rink. The tricky part was identifying the law school location. All I knew was that it located to the right of the Science Center and left of the Quad. I think I could argue the familiarization of my surroundings reflected in my map – in the case that I use the street or building throughout most of my week or that I can locate among the larger picture of Harvard’s campus.
I decided that I wanted to try and depict what is a significant segment of the square to me from the angle that seems most familiar: the start of my journey from home to school. This immediately clarified to me my immense blind spots regarding the route I trudge through every day: I was able to immediately “fill in” the details of important landmarks (e.g., the commercial building facing my home; the psychology building) – and could vaguely imagine the relative geographical relationships amongst these buildings – but had absolutely no sense of the location and aesthetics of the many other objects and streets between them. Thus, my first challenge was finding an approximate way to depict the key locations I had imagined “at large” and from a particular perspective/point in time, but I was thereafter more concerned by the many blank spaces that still remained: My sketch looked sterile and exaggeratedly suburban (conjuring up Celebration, Florida), and so I tried to add grungy details and guess at the location of some narrower roads – therefore sacrificing factual precision for an overall more “accurate” characterization. When I looked at Google Maps, I realized that I had missed numerous major streets and landmarks in my sketch, as well as the complex angles of those that I did include. I think this accentuates the overwhelming and limiting subjectivity of one’s perspective of his or her city: I had emphasized minute details (a menu on a storefront) while missing entire roads and buildings. Perhaps, for laypeople, residing in a city inevitably taints our knowledge of this place – as we succumb to the selective salience of daily living.
Visiting Copley Place/Prudential Center and Newbury street consecutively, one is struck by differential effects resulting from the use of outdoor/indoor elements in each: Copley Place/Prudential Center makes use of immense natural light, shining in from skylights as well as glass structures throughout the buildings. This outdoor “ruggedness” contrasts with the regal accents salient throughout the mall (crimson, gold colors) – which would theoretically create a luxurious experience that is separate from the stark concrete of Boston, and encompass “the best of both (outdoor and indoor) worlds”. However, the bustling, commercial atmosphere, with flashy stores lining every corridor, offsets any soothing effect of the natural light. And one has the sense that people have a fixed, practical intent in visiting the mall, walking purposefully to their intended destination. The entrances and exits from the mall are typically revolving doors – as if intended to transport visitors from an unadorned, pale domain to a lively realm of indulgence. Newbury Street, on the other hand, adopts elements of the pleasing uniformity of an indoor mall – or perhaps of Disneyland - in its homogenously brick red buildings, wide sidewalks, and signature cleanliness. Although when first entering the street one can immediately sense the lively distinction from the rest of the city (simulating, in a way, the divisive effect of a shopping mall), storefronts blend in more seamlessly here, preventing the chaotic effect at Copley Place/Prudential Center and promoting a leisurely, slow- paced, almost park-like atmosphere. The variety in the building adornments and shapes serves to offset the artificiality of such a setting, but the occasional “sandwich board” dotting the sidewalk provides a break in such ideality – reminding us of the inherently commercial nature of this street.
I found this sketch exercise quite intriguing because I realized I had a good understanding and background knowledge for the layout of the Harvard campus spatially. More specifically, I had a good idea for which directions the campus spread in and, in general, where things exist relative to each other. That being said, after looking at a map of campus, I was definitely less familiar with those parts of the campus that I spend less time around. As you can see from my sketch, my layout of the river houses relative to each other is most definitely off, as well as the streets around them. I live in the quad and am a concentrator in SEAS with Secondary in Music. As a result, my knowledge of the Yard and the SEAS and Law campuses as well as neighboring buildings is much stronger. Some interesting challenges I came across with this exercise were deciding what orientation for the paper I wanted to start sketching, and, relatedly, the scale of my drawings of the buildings relative to each other. Moreover, I realized that I should pay more attention to the layout of buildings between streets themselves! This part in particular was more difficult than I had originally expected.
I started my first draft by drawing the roads first and then trying to fit the buildings in, but soon realized it would be impossible because I couldn’t picture the different roads and their relation to each other. Instead, I decided to draw buildings and green spaces in relation to each other first and then draw the roads around them. In the second step, I thought about the path I would take from one building to another. This was much easier for two reasons: first, because I think of Harvard in relation to the buildings I move between rather than the roads themselves, and second, because the Harvard Square area does not have a neat grid pattern that would be easy to draw out. This made the task considerably easier for me, but I still made many mistakes and omissions; I think one of the biggest reasons is that I don’t use the roads or buildings equally frequently at Harvard. For instance, even though I started with the green spaces, I left out the largest of them all: the Cambridge Common. This is probably because I never walk there (especially not at night) or sit there, unlike Harvard Yard or even the small lawn on JFK Street. I also missed a large part of the graduate school buildings north of the Science Center, even though that part of campus is just as big as the Yard. I am largely unfamiliar with those buildings, and could only remember certain buildings that I have been to before (Northwest Labs, Law School Library, etc.). Another reason for my biggest omissions was that Cambridge’s streets are inherently confusing. For instance, the intersection of Mass Ave, Peabody Street (which I didn’t even know existed) and Cambridge Street is not only confusing but also constantly under construction, so I had trouble visualizing that part and the triangular green space in between. I completely left out Bow and Arrow Streets because they were so confusing – I knew they existed, but couldn’t place them in relation to the other streets. (Bow Street curves around Adams House like a bow, which makes so much sense now). Brattle Street and Mount Auburn Street don’t intersect in my map. Often, walking in Cambridge, I cross two or three streets at once, especially when one of them is curved, without thinking about which street is which. Perhaps mapping out intersections of streets at odd angles would have helped me to draw a better map. This leads me to conclude that I mapped out Harvard based on my experience of Harvard. The best example of this is that I completely failed to account for the bend in the river and imagined it as a straight line, especially because that is how I feel when I walk along the river. The map is also (as I had expected) not even close to scale, particularly because I imagine some spaces to be much larger based on the importance they have in my life.
In both Newbury Street and the Prudential Center, the store (commercial space) and the space outside of it are mediated by a storefront. The open, protruding nature of the storefront expose the commercial space to the passersby and display the products on sale; this is the primary design feature that shows the commercial nature of the store to passersby. On Newbury Street, the storefront and sidewalk is separated by an ambiguous space that is neither commercial nor public. The store is separated from the sidewalk by a physical distance of a few meters, and there are separate paths leading up to the doors of each store with a staircase leading to the door. This means that the individual must intentionally make a “commitment” of walking those few meters in order to enter the store. The storefront is elevated, adding to the sense of distance between storefront and sidewalk; there is sometimes even a fence between the two spaces. People rarely linger in this middle space (colored gray in my diagram) unless they are walking to get inside the store. From the viewpoint of the pedestrian, commercial elements stand out and invite one in (such as through the open storefront or the a-frames), but they are not intrusive and require a decision or commitment to engage in consumerist behaviors. However, in the Prudential Center, no such ambiguous middle space exists between the storefront and the rest of the space; the open storefront is in direct contact with the public space of the mall. In fact, the public space of the mall is not truly public, because everyone is a potential consumer and the entire mall is set up around the stores and storefronts; in this sense, even the walkways of the mall are “gray spaces” rather than true public spaces. As a result, people are evenly dispersed through the entire space because there is no extra commitment to entering a store. Another interesting difference between Newbury and Prudential is the spaces where people sit; whereas on Newbury Street, people take any possible space (such as elevated areas on the sidewalk or in front of trees) to sit, the benches are the sole and designated sitting space in the mall. In this setup, people are continually engaged in an activity such as shopping or walking ahead.
I am very surprised by how difficult it was for me to do this sketch. I have always had a terrible sense of direction and no artistic ability, but I have now realized how terrible my memory is as well. I could not remember any street names or true orientations. I have certainly forgotten entire streets that I only wander down occasionally, and things are definitely not drawn to scale. I was afraid to make any truly inerasable marks on the page because I was so unsure of the placement of all of the buildings, so the diagram comes across as light and hesitant. My map is an extremely inaccurate birds eye view of the city. I think this is because I often take the shuttle from place to place, and as a result I only know destinations rather than the streets I take to get there. I definitely only remembered landmarks that I visit often, and that are relevant to me in my everyday life like The Crimson, Starbucks and HAS. Additionally, I include almost exclusively public spaces because I don’t think of my private spaces as places that belong on a geographical map.
I chose to do the most familiar path that I know of today: my route to class. I begin at Eliot House (bottom left corner of the sketch labeled with a cursive ‘E’) and I travel upward toward Harvard Yard (designated by the ‘H’). I then travel around the Science Center toward the Law School, cross over the lawn, and end at Pierce Hall at the upper right corner of the sketch. I chose to exclude almost everything else, since they are not very pertinent to my everyday life and I thus could not remember their exact orientation. It took me quite a few iterations until I thought I got as close as possible to what the plan drawing of Harvard Square actually looked like. I also included two of my favorite places in the Square: Park Restaurant & Bar (denoted by the ‘P’) and Crema Café (denoted by the ‘C’). I visit Crema Café often so it felt natural to include it in my path. I often sit facing the window and observe the activity occurring directly in front of me. It is a pause in my path that allows me to reflect upon how my path is simply one of an infinite number of paths.