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.