In my sketch, I drew Harvard Yard and its surrounding areas with symbols and colors representing student housing, class or study spaces, tourist gathering areas, student gathering areas, and paths that students use to go from place to place. My map is fairly accurate in the roads from the Charles River to the Yard, but I was inaccurate west of JFK St. and north of the Yard. I also decided that my symbols would suffice for dorm and class buildings, which makes my map distinct from others. I have been to the Radcliffe Quad and the Law School campus only a few times, and this lack of familiarity showed in my sketch. These observations suggest that I am aware only of the areas of Harvard Square where I walk, and that there are individuals with independent perspectives that would likely draw a sketch reflecting different communal and physical characteristics of this area. Therefor one must be well researched in order to sketch an image of Harvard Square that gives the viewer an accurate visual and social understanding of the surrounding area.
In this map of Harvard Yard and Harvard Square, I tried to first lay out an accurate scaling of the distance between major landmarks, but also to feature barriers or landmarks that are not entirely ADA compliant. My sister uses a wheelchair, and on her visits to Harvard Square, I’ve developed an eye for roads that her wheelchair would have trouble traversing. Harvard Square is particularly hilly, coming up from the river, and at some locations, there aren’t smooth pedestrian walkways for us to take. Some of the paths that are particularly tricky are Dunster St, which is brick-laid and incredibly bumpy, the road coming up from Adams to the Yard, which is extremely steep and often crowded, and the stairs coming out of Lowell, towards Quincy. I also sought to highlight some incredibly well-designed buildings, such as the Art museum, which features an aesthetically pleasing accessibility ramp that isn’t tucked behind a side entrance. Incorporating accessibility into how we think about and conceptualize design is incredibly important to me, and I wanted to highlight where it was done well and done poorly in Harvard Square. From a broad overview on Google Maps, I noticed that because I was coming from a handicapped pedestrian perspective, the location of buildings frequently did not correspond to where one could actually enter them. For instance, while the entrance to Widener is inside Harvard Yard, the handicapped entrance to Widener is all the way on the other side of the building. A map that directs based on the shortest route also might not be the easiest route for someone in a wheelchair.
In this amateurish mental map which I have devised solely using my memory, and images that come to my mind when I think of the places around Harvard Square; depicts a path I take quite oftenly, the path that leads from my apartment to the river side. I live off-campus on Harvard Street, in the building I have depicted with the smoke coming from its' chimney. I usually take the road down to Harvard Sq, then turn left onto JFK Street to get to the river. I really enjoy the riverside either for exercise or contemplation and really like the duck who inhabit there, which I attempted to artistically convey. Comparing my map to an accurate one of course reveals the plethora of inaccuracies that are inherent in my mind map; but it also showed me how much mental space and importance we accredit to pathways we take often. This often leads to the architecture of these pathways and the building we come across on these pathways to plays bigger roles on our psyche and have influence on our everyday.
Sketch 1 Kevin Servellon I definitely cut some space between the Quad and Yard, and then I made the area below the the yard too big. It is obvious that I don’t pay attention when I am on the shuttle because I missed a significant portion between the yard and quad. Since I spend most of my time in the quad or yard, I feel as if it were much easier to draw those places to detail. I admired the aesthetic and architectural features of both areas. When I am on foot I definitely take more time to admire and become acquainted with what is around me. I never really go and explore the river houses or the athletic centers, so it explains as to why they are so contorted. Then we get to the Harvard Business School where I have absolutely no idea what is going on. After a close analysis, I have come to the conclusion that we never really know an entire city. I am only familiar with a small portion of the campus that I spend everyday at. At the same time these certain parts of a city become part of our identity, and we learn to navigate them much more efficiently. After studying this map, I definitely want to explore the neighborhood I live in. Cities have so much more to offer than meets the eye.
I began my first sketch with outlining as well as detailing the buildings on the side of the river with the Athletic Facilities. After finishing the Athletic buildings I realized I had taken up over half of the page and still needed to include all of Harvard Square area and the Yard so I threw that sketch out and decided to start a new one. With the new sketch the first thing I did was map out the major buildings/parks on both the top and bottom sections of my paper to provide a basic outline and boundaries that I then filled in while completing the sketch. The basic grid outline of Harvard Square area was pretty simple to remember and sketch, however I ran into some difficulty trying to draw the tiny roads interviewing the river houses as well as which buildings were supposed to go on which plot of land. I also found it difficult to scale the roads and the buildings after creating the initial scale of the buildings on the athletic side of the river. Many of the buildings on the Academic side of the river turned out to be scaled differently because I was running out of room.
I think that, just from looking at this sketch, it would be pretty obvious to any Harvard student where I live, at least to an extent. I began my sketch starting with my house, Dunster, in the bottom right corner, and planned to work northwest-ward as I went. Unfortunately, after getting caught up in the intricacies of the streets and other River houses, I realized too late that my scale was off, and that there was no way I would be able to include both the Yard and the Quad in my sketch. I’m fairly pleased with how I represented the River Houses (apart from Adams…which was affected by my confusion regarding “that one slanted street”—I couldn’t remember how Bow and Arrow street fit into the overall picture). My focus son the Houses, though, left a lot of the interesting parts of Harvard Square unsketched, and didn’t give me the chance to dig into my memory to see how much I could remember of my one year in the Yard.
The first striking difference between my map and an accurate one is the scale and spacing, especially between streets. I found that I drew relatively accurate depictions of areas I know well, and either exaggerated or reduced the distance between these areas. For example, the true distance between Harvard Yard and Dunster House is far smaller than depicted on my map, while the distance between Harvard Yard and the Quad is a bit larger than I drew. The streets are generally correctly placed, though they are far less straight on the actual map than on my map from memory. I omitted some streets from my map, imagining connections between certain blocks that do not exist. These differences likely stem from my familiarity with certain areas and how I navigate between them. I was far more likely to imagine streets as straight North-South paths as opposed to the curved, sometimes winding avenues that they are. This exercise really shows that the way one moves and stops throughout a city has a great impact on how one imagines it to be physically organized.
My sketch includes a map of the Undergraduate campus at Harvard University, noting major roads and sidewalks that travel throughout the campus. An important note about my sketch is that it does not include all sidewalks, but rather the most congested sidewalks that can be found in Harvard Yard and throughout the Athletic fields. Additionally, the running trail along the river is another sidewalk that is heavily used and I found it was very important to include in my map. Roads are marked with arrows in order to indicate the direction of travel since most roads in the town of Cambridge are one-ways with an occasional two-way street. Scale plays an important role in my sketch because the building, roads, and sidewalks are not all drawn to scale. It is also important to note that the scale tends to vary between the different “main parts” of campus, including the River Housing, Harvard Yard, the Quad and the Athletic fields. Most of the blank space that surrounds the map is less detailed than the rest because I am very unfamiliar with the territory and felt it was best to leave it blank. As a Senior who is an athlete, I am very familiar with the Athletic fields but as a resident of Dunster, I have never been to the quad and am very unfamiliar with the layout of the Quad’s campus. On a related note to scale, there is an issue with spacing between buildings and sidewalks/roads. Although some buildings are nearly touching the road/sidewalk, it was important to draw them as separate lines and the spacing allowed me to provide a more detailed rendering of the areas and allowed me to provide insight including the direction of travel.
I found this exercise surprisingly difficult. Trying to layout my mental image of the square onto paper stumped me. First, I could not figure out how to orient Harvard Square onto the dimensions of my notebook paper. The question of fitting everything on the page with the proper scale left me grasping for the right size and direction of my landmarks. Not surprisingly, the yard occupies a much larger area than appropriate, as it was the easiest starting point. I knew how the buildings related to each other and I knew that it was generally a rectangle. This left me squeezing other parts onto too small areas of paper. However, even in the yard, I didn’t know the footprint or the number of certain dorms and buildings that I had never visited. In the bottom area of my map (between the yard and the river) I became overwhelmed in the details and number of features. As these blocks are where I live and spend most of my time, I knew the buildings and the streets the best. However, towards the river (down JFK) I do not spend as much time, so I became more confused. In fact, I ended up excluding an entire block and street between Mt. Auburn and Memorial Drive that consisted of buildings I do not use; I had simplified this area to only the houses. This led to a problem on the other side of JFK, where I knew there were commercial buildings and a park, yet I couldn’t make the streets match up. As a result, the scale on one side of JFK is different than the other. Interestingly, I found the streets the most difficult aspect of the map to draw. I remembered what buildings they led to and their names, but not their lengths and directions, particularly the streets that are not in a grid (such as Eliot St., Brattle St., Arrow St.). However, when I began my map, I instinctively began with the main streets. For my studies, this led me to zoom in on certain difficult areas to organize them, such as the intersection by the T and how the JFK and Mt. Auburn intersection (which I knew was a 90 degree intersection) related to the river. I discovered later that it was actually easier to place the buildings I knew in relation to each other and connect them with the appropriate streets. As I added more buildings, I realized how little space I had left. I had to erase and redraw many of my landmarks as smaller and re-angle my streets to fit everything. In the end, I was most surprised by what I had to omit. I knew I was missing things, such as Winthrop St, buildings in the yard, the streets leading to the quad, but I genuinely did not know what they were; I just sensed a lack. Things I had noticed and moved around but never used or named. I learned that after four years, I still do not know how to get to the Quad, so I left it out of my map.
After having finished my sketch, I compared what I drew with some of the Google map renderings and realized a significant difference. Where I decided to notate things so that it was easier for me to draw, google maps shows much more detail. However, I have decided to include topological features to my map showing where there are slopes in the streets and the places most traveled by pedestrians and students. Google maps fails to include these features because their rendering is much more informational. Similarly, both my sketch and Google maps include the directionality of the traffic which I found to be pretty cool. The difference in both renderings could be due to the humans’ tendency to remember things based on landmarks. When I was drawing, I constantly tried to relate things to certain landmarks that I remembered seeing as I was walking. I also associated certain locations to certain memories so my renderings include much more of what I perceived as I walked through the square. In the end, our renderings achieve the same goal of showing the idea of what the square looks like, but they are represented in different perspectives.