Joy Wang

Joy Wang

In making my sketch, I started with the Quad, which, while far from the mind’s eye of many, is central to my understanding of Harvard as it is my home, and drew everything in relation to it. Something interesting I found while making my drawing is that even though the assignment called for personal impressions of the city, I tried my hardest throughout the process to envision it as accurately as possible, and spent hours trying to imagine the space in my mind and how exactly different parts of it fits together. This likely comes from the fact that I am well aware that I have a bad sense of direction, so a large part of my experience of the city is learning how to find my way (poorly, with the aid of Google Maps). Because of this, I realized that my understanding of the urban space occurs not as a well-developed mental map, but something more like a collection of discrete snapshots and impressions of specific places that I can picture individually in my mind, and then have to fit together consciously in space like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Therefore, one of the things that struck me most when I pulled up a map of Harvard, is how my buildings were all roughly squares rather than the shape of the actual buildings, since I retain the shape of the building in its entirety as little more than a concept composed of the experiences I have had there. Accordingly, my last step in the sketch, after trying to represent the space as accurately as possible, was to add the symbols that represent my daily life around Harvard. In a way, the sketch explained my poor sense of direction, and really revealed to me how my understanding consists of these impressions and snapshots of individual places imbued with personal memory.