Al Fernandez

Al Fernandez

After a couple of drafts in which I made several buildings (namely, Annenberg, the Mac Gym, and Widener) the center of my sketch, I realized that I was having problems with the proportion of the streets. Afterwards, I came to rely on the streets as the most accurate outline for the sketch. The problem with this approach, however, is that Cambridge seems to be a city not really organized by streets. There's no other way to explain the sudden appearance of Oxford Street, the short-lived existence of South Street, and the strange looping shape that Massachusetts Avenue takes. On top of that, I started having problems with accurately representing the slant of the streets, often keeping something straight when the street was, slowly but surely, curving one way or another.

Something that I realized as I was drawing, which was then confirmed when I looked at an actual map, was just how many green spaces there are around campus. Many of these spaces, however, are crowded and jammed in, so that, while you know they are there, they don't really contribute in any significant way to the landscape of the city. I think that, in order for these green spaces to really show up in our perception of a city, they need to border a well-frequented street. Most of Harvard's green spaces, however, seem to be surrounded by either dormitories or lecture halls.