Wednesday, April 29, 2009

The meanings of campus space


Louie Ulman (English) forwarded an article from the Chronicle that speaks to the heart of Walkscape. "The Power of Place on Campus" by Louis Broussard talks about the importance of creating a variety of "sacred spaces" on campus--"among them ritual or ceremonial spaces, processional or exploring spaces, perspective-dominant spaces, and refuge spaces."
A true learning environment provides for both formal instruction and learning that takes place without instruction. Informal learning touches more than just the cerebral — it combines the head, the heart, and the gut. For example, think about reading Thoreau in a sacred space rather than at one's desk in a dorm room. Imagine ad hoc outdoor classrooms designed near an English department's traditional classrooms. Students returning to campus decades later will remember those moments and spaces where knowledge turned into wisdom.
Talk about "the sacred" probably makes some of us nervous; I'd probably rephrase it as "spaces of value," places that mark, enable and intensify a particular kind of emotional or affective state. Mirror Lake is, for me, at least potentially one of those places: beside the library, near the street, in the midst of things but set apart, quiet and motion (the fountain of inspiration) kept in balance.

Broussard makes an obvious but excellent point: that universities are, for many students, sites of crucial emotional and intellectual growth. The space of the campus will be integrated into all sorts of stories of identity-formation--stories of separation (loneliness), discovery (excitement), risk, fear, courage and exultation, and re-affiliation (longing and belonging). Memories are being, intensely, made. How can the campus be cultivated to support and connect these memories into a sense of character?

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Learning to Walk

Just got back from the first official Walkscape walk with Prudence Gill. We started (started?) at the center of the Oval, looking at the radiating paths (the one from Hopkins not quite lined up with the one from Hagerty; the one path with a bend in it). First notice: the big ride-on mower making noise on one end of the Oval, the sound of the power plant venting on the other. Walkscape through Soundscapes (jets overhead; helicopters circling the hospital; buses and trucks).

On the Oval today: a tent set up for prayer week, and a booth for Action for AIDS (through World Vision), where for a dollar I got to sign a laminated photo of an AIDS orphan (I signed: Peace).

Then we meandered, letting our attention follow the signs of spring--the trees leafing out, the flowerbeds with a few spikes of tulips, ants building furiously among the mongoose grasses, the vista through to the Physics building, opened up by the disappearance of Brown Hall, the stripes of white caulking on Dulles Hall. The bricks in the sidewalks aren't brick at all, but dyed concrete pavers, inset in sand.

Think about our campus under constant construction, buildings rising and falling, the work of education made visible. Oxford and Cambridge, the exemplary Universities of the Anglo imagination, are built of stone, monuments to the endurance (in all senses) of knowledge. Our University stripped the ivy from its walls--to protect the buildings?--and lost the insulating function, so the buildings are harder to heat and cool.

Somewhere along the way, our walk became an Improving walk, as we started wondering about how the campus looked. Maybe it was as we moved towards RPAC, where the decisions made still seem raw and somewhat arbitrary. Larkins Plaza, for instance, between RPAC and the Aquatic Pavilion, is severe and inhospitable, a blank expanse of concrete sweeping from the library down to the playing fields. Why, Prudence asked, are there no places to sit and read, to lure people from their tasks into reflection? Why no fountain to serve as visual punctuation? Where are the rose-gardens of yesteryear?

The facade of Kunz Hall calls out for a Mondrian treatment, lightening up the monotony of the modernist grids in that corridor. Or why not ivy on the foundation? A Living Wall or Vertical Garden, moving the campus towards green. Rather than segmenting our knowledge-projects (agriculture off to the West, Science to the North), why not weave them in, thread them through the fabric of the university? One of the inspirations for Walkscape is a book called Patterned Ground: Entanglements of nature and culture (2004), in which landscapes are treated as occasions for discerning patterns and rhythms of various sorts.

And then back to Hopkins Hall, where--for the first time--I noticed the homage to FLW detailing, just to the left of the 17th St entrance: a ladder of polished red granite, a strip of colored windows, all but lost under the battered awning.

Friday, April 24, 2009

Walking to Learn

Visitors to our campus are often given what is fondly called the "backwards walk," a guided tour of the university, conducted by a corps of highly skilled OSU Ambassadors. You can see them on sunny mornings, fanning out from Enarson Hall, like birds flocking behind the call of their leader.

Walking backwards may create interesting perspectives, but Walkscape does not offer guided tours. We're looking for un-guided tours, straying off the beaten paths, improvising rather than following the script. Walks that occasion observation, contemplation, rumination, conversation, insight. Alongside the established campus map, there are other, imaginary maps--possible worlds of knowledge, speculative labyrinths, lines of desire.

William Zinsser published a book, back in the eighties, called Writing to Learn. Walkscape could be called "Walking to Learn."

Thoughts on Foot

It's April 24: a holiday for trees. Celebrate Arbor Day by taking a walk through the Chadwick Arboretum, where you'll find a number of mile-long walks as well as a meditative labyrinth. To get there on foot, you'll probably have to cross the Olentangy River: if you look carefully, you should be able to see the turtles.

The Olentangy used to be called the Whetstone River, a more accurate translation of its Native Shawnee name; the Ohio Legislature renamed it Olentangy ("Red-Face-Paint") in the 1830's, borrowing the name from what was likely Big Walnut Creek.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009



Walkscape OSU is a month-long open invitation to:
  • Explore the campus of Ohio State University (on foot)
  • Document your discoveries, observations, impressions and ideas in a way that makes sense to you. Images, objects found or made, words, sounds, gestures, notations are all welcome.
  • Add your vision to the Walkscape Scroll: On the Oval, May 20 10-4pm. We will be composing a collectively-imagined re-mapping of the campus, a tapestry of ways, paths and sites.


Walkscape is inspired by a book of the same name by Francesco Careri (Barcelona, 2002). Writing as an architectural and urban theorist, Careri examined a series of moments in the history of 20C art when artists turned walking--bodily movement through space--into a critical and creative gesture. Dissatisfied with the conventional and institutional enclosures of art--the frame, the studio, the museum--they took to the streets, looking for new ways to see.

In a line that stretches (circuitously) from the Dadaist "excursions" through Surrealist "deambulation," Situationist "drifting," Richard Long's "A Line Made by Walking" (1967) and the work of OSU's Robert Ladislas Derr, the walking body turns into a means of both creating and resisting meaning: resisting prescribed itineraries, thwarting predictable outcomes, opening new points of access and surprising vistas. What emerges from these bipedal experiments, Careri suggests, are a range of alternative ways of evoking and inhabiting space: practices of pilgrimage, dreamscape, playscape, heterotopia.