I think that the overarching features of the area are similar in my drawing and in the actual map. I paid particular attention to the layout of buildings in the yard as well as the area near The Charles on the Somerville side. I also focused a lot on making sure to add color to the photo in order to separate different types of spaces, in particular: water, pavement, grass, and buildings (both classic brick and modern). One aspect that I found particularly difficult was the proportionality of roads, the exact directions of each road, and how the road systems are connected. In addition, while it was not very hard to picture each part of the map from the perspective of someone walking on the ground, I found it particularly difficult to mentally adjust this image to a bird’s eye view. I think that my map and the exact map are different primarily because people do not remember tiny details of places with which they do not normally interact. For example, I walk down JFK St. to the boathouse every day yet I could hardly remember the order of the shops along the street except for the ones that I frequently visit (i.e. CVS). However, as I mentioned earlier, I think that people retain a good general relative spatial perception of the area around them with regard to the general shapes of roads, buildings, and parks. In other words, I know that the Science Center is beside Annenberg and across from Canaday, but it is hard for me to remember exactly how the path between the buildings looks or what the relative distances between each one are.
I drew the part of Harvard Yard that I frequented most as a Freshman. Immediately, I realized that for having walked through this area so many times, I struggled to remember the names of certain buildings, but just remembered their general shape. I even left out an entier building - Boylston Hall, where I had 2 classes last year! I realized that while the buildings of the yard are very well planned, the paths through the larger areas of the yard are a bit less logical from a bird's eye view. Even as someone walking through the yard, I knew that the paths got me to where I wanted to be, but I wasn't sure how. According to the actual Harvard map, they are even less organized and straight than I anticipated - but still effectively connect the routes and control a build up of congestion. Additionally, I wasn't entirely sure which direction was North, and I wasn't sure how to accurately measure the scale. But I approximated as closely as I could, and I'm curious to see how far off I am. For a place I go so often, this was remarkably difficult to accurately capture on paper!
First, the indoor shopping malls, Prudential and Copley Place: these malls, while indoors, attempt to achieve a sense of the outside. In the Prudential, most of the ceilings are made of glass, and in Copley, in the main courtyard there is a water feature that rises several stories tall. Glass is utilized in both to create a sense of transparency and luminance. The walkway again mirrors this mission, although was broken up abruptly by support stanchions that added a lot of weight to the environment. For both malls, the entrances require the visitor to go up an escalator (or elevator). The elevated nature of the buildings perhaps prevents "unwanted" visitors (i.e. the homeless). However, there were many paths that met in the form of courtyards with ample seating. In contrast, Newbury street is a straight line. There is little to no seating, replaced by many trees. One could almost compare it to the malls, as the buildings themselves served as malls and the sky the ceiling. There is much signage to illustrate the commercial element of this space (just like in a mall), but there is a more authentic, lived-in feel. Yet the entrances also require the visitor to walk up or down steps. Despite being totally different environments, the malls and Newbury have mirrored properties as commercial spaces.
When thinking about my sketch, I started with Harvard Yard because that seemed like the center of campus to me. As I was drawing, I realized that I tended to group certain things together. For instance, I grouped all of the parallel streets between Mass Ave and Mt. Auburn as a single unit, subdivided into individual streets. I travel down these streets often, so it was easy for me to remember their names. I also thought of the “river houses” as a group. In this case, I could draw the outline of Kirkland house with a lot of specific details because that’s where I live, but I couldn’t think about what Dunster looked like from an aerial view because I don’t know the floor plan of that house as well. When drawing Harvard square, it helped me to think about the locations of specific stores relative to each other. This approach of grouping caused the buildings on my map to be disproportionate. The size of each does not necessarily correspond to relative importance, but is rather the result of stretching and compressing individual blocks of space as I worked out how they related to each other in terms of proximity. Finally, as I compare my sketch to an actual map of Harvard, I realize I forgot to include several buildings. I think this is because I don’t frequent those places as often and blocked them out of my mental map.
In completing the assignment, it’s obvious that the areas with which we are most familiar come to us easier and larger than others. As a person that both lives in the Quad and completed the majority of studies in the engineering school, my map shows relatively accurately the walk between the yard and the Quad (down Garden street) in terms of spacing and landmarks but the area below the Square by the river houses and athletic fields, is spaced much too tight and has significantly less detail in terms of known buildings. It’s also clear in how I distributed space between these two areas, with the walk to the Quad and Porter Square taking up far more space than other parts. I imagine those with close ties to, or with more exposure to, these areas would have the opposite perspective. It’s also interesting in Harvard Square that my map has little detail in the Square – I think that reflects my own perspective of the Square in that it is a litany of shops but I do not really frequent any of them nor could I point out any specific ones and their locations. While I am familiar with the relative locations, orders and lengths somewhat of the streets, the details on these streets are hard for me to conjure from memory.
In Copley, the glass and brick create a distinct industrial or commercial atmosphere. The large glass panes that let you look inside the building. It helps that “Neiman Marcus” also boasts a giant sign indicating that the department store lies within. The walkway as well identifies the space as wholly commercial as a glass walkway between apartment buildings in a downtown area would be quite strange. The combination of buildings made of similar or identical striped brick unifies the whole commercial spaeces as belonging to one entity (Copley Mall). Finally, the map in the top left corner, which is placed in various places throughout the inside of the mall, shows the purely commercial use as well as the way in which the Prudential center (seen from afar from this entrance) is connected to the building. On Newbury street, the older buildings are much better integrated into the whole setting –it’s not a bunch of identical buildings but rather the original residential character of old downtown Boston shines through. That character is seen in the dimensionality as well as the different colors of buildings. What distinguishes the commercial from the residential spaces on Newbury Street to me are the differences in windows as well as the minimal signage that appears on some of the buildings. The windows are so interesting because the lower floors of the buildings, those used for retail, have large glass windows that take up the entire façade, letting customers see the wares inside. Old-fashioned signage and awnings show customers the names of the stores they may go into. A secondary structural element that maintains the residential character is the intact fire escapes that connect higher floors to the sidewalk as well as to other buildings (it seems). I tried to maintain those differences in my sketch despite not using color.
Sketching Harvard and the surrounding area from memory took a number of attemps. The most challenging things was definitely the scale. I initially started by first sketching the river houses and put some time into getting their details and relative proportions right. However, I soon realized that I would be needing a much larger peice of paper if I was going to fit it all in. I started again with the Charles river, the Quad and the Harvard yard, trying to figure out their relative proportions. After much erasing and redrawing, I came up with a rough skeleton that I felt was most correct and filled it in from there. Comparing it to the layout of Harvard on Google Maps it is clear that I’ve over- and under-estimated some proportions as well as miss features entirely. In my initial mental maps I placed more emphasis on the houses along the river than other parts of the school as they are parts I feel I know best. Conversely I found it difficult to understand/draw how all the buildings in the square fit together or the arrangement of buildings in the athletic complex over the river. I initially wanted to get the specific shapes and details of buildings correct but later decided that describing the relative distance between buildings was more important. This exercise made me realize how little I pay attention to the buildings on campus that don’t use. Examples of this are Wigglesworth (freshmen dorms) and The Harvard Lampoon. I also made the area behind the science center - with all the engineering, CS, chemistry and biology labs - larger than it actually is. This might be accounted for by the fact that there is a lot of grassy area around those buildings which creates the illusion of more space between buildings than there really is.
My journey began, as prescribed, at the entrance of Copley Place Mall on the corner of Dartmouth and Stuart streets. I found the two horse statues at the entrance to the Copley Place to be an interesting symbol. Almost as if they were regal gate keepers, these horses are the ﬁrst indication of something artiﬁcial and curated. The shape of horses are easily recognisable, yet they are made from what looks like scrunched-up sheets of metal. Similarly, the shopping mall itself is made from very different materials than you would ﬁnd in the make-up of a shopping street, yet they are recognisably similar. One inside, visitors are immediately elevated off from the street level by two sets of escalators into the main hall of Copley Place. The stores are all beautiful, expensive and big. There is an indoor garden at the center of the main hall, creating the sense of an oasis within an otherwise artiﬁcal space. Everything is polished and shiny from the ﬂoors to the windows to the sunglasses, shoes and jewels in the store-front windows. The last store at the end of the hall is Tiffany’s Exiting the main hall, vistors are funneled down an escaltor and towards the pedestrian bridge leading into the Prudential Center shopping mall. Signiﬁcantly less elegant, the Prudential Center mall has a collection of stores of a lower calibre. The Prudential Center mall contains more advertising banners and more small stalls in the middle of the walk way, especially with Boston and Harvard/MIT merchandise. Newbury street is amongst the most glamorous streets in Boston. Notwithstanding, there are clear physical differences between the cultivated interior of the Copley Shopping mall, with it’s two levels and marble-tiled ﬂoors, and Newbury street, ﬂat and made of concrete. Starting from the Boston Common end of Newbury street, the ﬁrst stores we encounter are Burberry and Tiffany’s. It’s interesting that Tiffany’s is located at the end/beginning of both Newbury street and Copley place, I wonder if this was intentional. The high calibre of stores continues as you move down the street, however stores begin to be interspersed with cafes and eateries. Past Dartmouth street, there are signiﬁcantly fewer luxury stores. Instead, stores like Forever 21 and Urban outﬁtters become more common. This is similar to the transition between Copley Place and the Prudential Center mall. One of the most signiﬁcant differences between Copley Place/Prudential Center mall and Newbury street is the signage and advertising. Being a privately owned space, the mall is able to sell advertising space on walls, and free standing signs, directing customers towards particular stores which otherwise look fairly simlar from the exterior due to the uniform style of the buildings’ interiors. As a private space, Newbury has little to no advertising and the buildings vary stylistically. There are many more observations to be made, but I elected to represent my experience of the two spaces as a 3D rendered maps accompanied by a perspective drawing of each of the spaces, highlighting the difference in the walking passage and visuals of each space.
The general layout of the map I drew is very similar to the official university map, with buildings appropriately located relative to each other. The level of detail for different areas are very apparent though. The areas with the greatest detail include the cluster of River Houses and Harvard Yard. However, most of Harvard Square, the Business School, the Athletic fields, the area up to and including the Quad and east of the River House boundaries have significantly less detail. This difference can very likely be attributed to the way that I use the space. Because I do not visit these areas as regularly, my memory of them are evidently vague. On the other hand, the River Houses and Harvard Yard, which I walk through daily, are drawn with greater detail and accuracy. These differences suggest that how people use and relate to the city are acutely individualized. If I lived in the Quad and was an athlete, my vision of Harvard would be uniquely different. What I notice and not notice and even what I choose to include and not include uniquely represent my experience. With a city being used by a multitude of people in several different ways, designing spaces that consider as diverse perspectives and functions can be critical to creating a space that will be well-remembered by all.