Anne Cheng

Anne Cheng

When drawing Harvard’s campus (from Quad to athletic facilities) from memory, I mapped out the common Harvard shuttle routes and differentiated the buildings from undergraduate living spaces, classrooms, and businesses. After looking at my colored sketch from a distance, I realize that I am most familiar with the areas contained within the shuttle routes. I live in the Quad and walk to golf practice very often, so I feel like I have an unusually good sense of these relatively distant parts of campus. After comparing my own sketch to Google Maps, I am most surprised by how little I remember of walkways cutting through the yard and the streets that go through upperclassmen housing. My sketch also reminds me of a somewhat futile representation of Jeffersonian planning, where the Yard is the most central public space and all other surroundings are individual gardens in a somewhat grid-like format. In the vicinity of the Yard are buildings where classes take place, buildings where business occurs, and buildings where upperclassmen can live. It is interesting to see how living, learning, and business spaces all merge together at Massachusetts Avenue. I also found it interesting to find that streets that divide different sections (i.e. living, learning, business) tend to be bigger.