Eliot Harrison

Eliot Harrison

In my map of Harvard, I prioritised the spaces that I interact with. I largely ignored places across the river, in the quad, or beyond the Science Center, because I rarely venture to those areas of the campus. I live in Eliot House. I started my sketch at this intersection between the river and JFK Street which leads up to the Square and the Yard. Sketching showed me that everything—campus, shops, streets—are crammed into a dense area. However, shops are clearly delineated from campus. While the buildings are physically close together, the stores in Harvard Square occupy an entirely different world than the college. This includes residential Houses. As a result, an urban campus exists without being hectically intertwined with the city around it. Doing my sketch, I think I did a pretty good job at mapping the streets, as they follow a loose grid. Towards the edge of campus, I found that I didn’t know what to draw next because, as I wrote earlier, there are places that I just don’t go. I tried to draw pedestrian traffic in blue pen as a nebulous, sprawling mess. I thought about where I walk on any normal day and thought about how many people I might see around me at those times.