Walking in place

I was born in the most urban of places. I grew up watching people in the heart of the city and learning about their behavior. Now I live in a tiny rural town where there are few people on the streets, and when I take my exercise walks, I watch changes in the landscape more than people. But the landscape has been sculpted by generations of farmers, loggers, and now a small population of full time and second home owners, and so what I see reflects a synthesis of the human and natural landscape.

The experience of these disparate environments mean that when I experience places, I bring both urban and rural "eyes" to what I see, and, as in the mythological chimeras, there is a unique power in that kind of observation.

As I will be "living" in two places this fall, I will be exploring two related environments: the reservoir in Cambridge and one of the walks I take near where I live in Vermont. The focus will be on the reservoir since that is a more "peopled" place, but I will compare it, where possible, with the "Buxton loop." The walks are roughly equal in length, but radically different in character. I know the Buxton loop well, but am just learning the reservoir, so I will bring different experiential knowledge to each. Neither are explicitly architectural, but both places reveal much of human patterns of place use.

I look forward to working with the group.

You can see maps here and here.