Kate Yoon

Kate Yoon

I started my first draft by drawing the roads first and then trying to fit the buildings in, but soon realized it would be impossible because I couldn’t picture the different roads and their relation to each other. Instead, I decided to draw buildings and green spaces in relation to each other first and then draw the roads around them. In the second step, I thought about the path I would take from one building to another. This was much easier for two reasons: first, because I think of Harvard in relation to the buildings I move between rather than the roads themselves, and second, because the Harvard Square area does not have a neat grid pattern that would be easy to draw out.

This made the task considerably easier for me, but I still made many mistakes and omissions; I think one of the biggest reasons is that I don’t use the roads or buildings equally frequently at Harvard. For instance, even though I started with the green spaces, I left out the largest of them all: the Cambridge Common. This is probably because I never walk there (especially not at night) or sit there, unlike Harvard Yard or even the small lawn on JFK Street. I also missed a large part of the graduate school buildings north of the Science Center, even though that part of campus is just as big as the Yard. I am largely unfamiliar with those buildings, and could only remember certain buildings that I have been to before (Northwest Labs, Law School Library, etc.).

Another reason for my biggest omissions was that Cambridge’s streets are inherently confusing. For instance, the intersection of Mass Ave, Peabody Street (which I didn’t even know existed) and Cambridge Street is not only confusing but also constantly under construction, so I had trouble visualizing that part and the triangular green space in between. I completely left out Bow and Arrow Streets because they were so confusing – I knew they existed, but couldn’t place them in relation to the other streets. (Bow Street curves around Adams House like a bow, which makes so much sense now). Brattle Street and Mount Auburn Street don’t intersect in my map. Often, walking in Cambridge, I cross two or three streets at once, especially when one of them is curved, without thinking about which street is which. Perhaps mapping out intersections of streets at odd angles would have helped me to draw a better map.

This leads me to conclude that I mapped out Harvard based on my experience of Harvard. The best example of this is that I completely failed to account for the bend in the river and imagined it as a straight line, especially because that is how I feel when I walk along the river. The map is also (as I had expected) not even close to scale, particularly because I imagine some spaces to be much larger based on the importance they have in my life.