Morgan Spaulding

Morgan Spaulding

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.