Electra Lang

Electra Lang

It’s immediately obvious, looking at my map, that my knowledge of Harvard is very much concentrated on the Square and the Yard and as one gets further towards the periphery of the campus and surrounding area, my knowledge rapidly diminishes. While the center of the map is pretty accurate and recognizable as the Harvard Square area, the Quad looks absolutely nothing like how I drew it—for one thing it’s further away, but it’s also much larger with more buildings. The Law School, Mather, Dunster, the Kennedy School, the Business School, and much of the athletic complex fare the same way. I even forgot Leverett’s dining hall.

Many of my angles are wrong too: JFK street is parallel to Holyoke and Dunster, whereas mine are at angles, creating very wide blocks in some places. The intersection of Quincy Street and Mass Ave is disproportionately large and the block with the Old Inn is in the wrong place. It’s interesting that in many cases the shapes of blocks I generally got right, but their relations to one another are often off.

Scale, too, posed a problem. The Science Center is enormous (about a quarter the size of the whole of larger Harvard Yard), while Memorial Hall is too small. Boylston and Dudley ended up tiny. Blocks which should be near the same size, aren’t. Kirkland (one of the smallest houses) is hue in my map as a result of the incorrect angle of JFK. The connecting bridge between the Yard and the Science Center is also not wide enough in proportion to the rest of the plaza and the part of Mass Ave by the Common more than doubles in width.

Though I’m largely pretty accurate towards the center of the map (it’s telling that I unconsciously centered the entire thing almost exactly on my dorm (Claverly), pushing the map too far to the left on the page), there are certain blocks where I could recall almost nothing about what was in them, despite walking past them nearly every day. There are also many storefronts which I completely forgot about, though I was fairly certain I could remember all the stores in a certain stretch.

I chose to focus my map mostly on the green spaces in and around the Square and on the pattern of traffic flow—the latter of which can get quite tricky around here and so was fun to think through. By picturing every street corner to myself and trying to call up which way the cars passed me, I was able to reconstruct quite accurately the directions of traffic flow, though I’m seldom ever in a car here. As for the green spaces, my approximation of their distributions in the yard and in the quads of various houses is sometimes quite accurate and sometimes wholly off, leading me to think that what was guiding me in drawing them was less real memory of what they looked like and more the knowledge of the fact that they had to be there.