Timothy Shea

Timothy Shea

In my sketches of Newbury St and Copley Place and the Prudential Center Malls, I focused on two different themes that I noticed while walking through each. What immediately struck me in Copley Place and the Prudential Center Malls was a feeling of constant movement surrounding me in the somewhat narrow-feeling halls of the mall. If I stopped walking for a moment, the groups surrounding me would continue so that I had to pull myself to the side of the hall to stay out of their way. In the various wings of the Prudential Mall, direction seemed uniform between the hundreds of people surrounding me. It was easy to find myself following the crowd on my side of the hallway for the entire wing without noticing. However, once you reach central areas, where halls converged, there was a confusing mixing of directions. Perhaps I am not used to such crowded malls, which made this characteristic of Copley and the Prudential stick out to me. On Newbury Street, I started my walk near the Hynes Convention Center and Massachusetts Pike and as I continued down the street, the architecture had a very evident pattern. While my walk began with smaller, flat-faced brick buildings, it evolved to the characteristic larger curved-faced brick buildings, until I reached larger-still department stores, hotels, and churches that dominated my surroundings before I reached the Public Gardens. This change in building size made me feel like I was advancing into a larger more advanced city than the initial architecture hinted. Also it is important to note that the buildings on Newbury Street are so unique that my sketch paid less attention to the straight nature of the street, and more to what a shopper finds themself observing to their right and left. I indicated hypothetical individuals in both sketches by money signs, because of dominating theme of high-end shopping in both settings.