Nina Hooper

Nina Hooper

Sketching Harvard and the surrounding area from memory took a number of attemps. The most challenging things was definitely the scale. I initially started by first sketching the river houses and put some time into getting their details and relative proportions right. However, I soon realized that I would be needing a much larger peice of paper if I was going to fit it all in. I started again with the Charles river, the Quad and the Harvard yard, trying to figure out their relative proportions. After much erasing and redrawing, I came up with a rough skeleton that I felt was most correct and filled it in from there.

Comparing it to the layout of Harvard on Google Maps it is clear that I’ve over- and under-estimated some proportions as well as miss features entirely. In my initial mental maps I placed more emphasis on the houses along the river than other parts of the school as they are parts I feel I know best. Conversely I found it difficult to understand/draw how all the buildings in the square fit together or the arrangement of buildings in the athletic complex over the river. I initially wanted to get the specific shapes and details of buildings correct but later decided that describing the relative distance between buildings was more important.

This exercise made me realize how little I pay attention to the buildings on campus that don’t use. Examples of this are Wigglesworth (freshmen dorms) and The Harvard Lampoon. I also made the area behind the science center - with all the engineering, CS, chemistry and biology labs - larger than it actually is. This might be accounted for by the fact that there is a lot of grassy area around those buildings which creates the illusion of more space between buildings than there really is.