A Snapshot of the Past

I found this awesome old map of the U the other day, and I wanted to include it in this blog because I feel like it's a great conclusion to this semester.

It's amazing how much less there used to be.  Also, I have been utterly fascinated with the old dorms at the U.  I keep hearing about them from my parents and other people who went to the U when it still looked like this.  I have walked though the area where the Austin dorms used to be quite frequently.  There are odd patches of sidewalk that don't connect to anything, and I always wondered why they were there.  Then I found out about the old dorms, and to see a picture and how much it's changed over the years really helps me remember that the campus is a living organism.  Not everything that occurs here is growth; sometimes things are removed.  That is a comforting notion to me, because I feel like the campus has only grown in all the time I've known it, and eventually, there won't be enough space.

Also, it blows my mind how sparse upper campus looks.  It's probably because they didn't draw in Fort Douglas in detail, but still.  It seems like there is so much more up there now.  Also, the Tanner dance building by Mario Cappecchi brings back so many memories for me.  I used to watch my best friend's dance performances there when I was in elementary school.  I had forgotten that they tore it down.

Reviewing a map like this is precious for me.  It helps me remember awesome things about my past and imagine the past as it was for other people.  If you get a chance, I'd always recommend looking at a snapshot of the past.

Another Garden Idea

I came upon this website/post/page/idea this week, and I thought it was really cool.  I hope to eventually do something like this with my yard.

http://growfood-notlawns.com/started-boxes-60-days-later-neighbors-not-believe-built/

I don't know if I would put it in my front yard, because of the potential for it to get ruined or stolen from.  Some of the plants listed here I don't eat so much, so I'd maybe put those ones in the front, as well as the ones that are easy to pick from/hard to break.  I think this concept would also go well in a small community garden, so long as most/all of the participants understood how to properly maintain the plants they were picking from so that they weren't damaged or uncared for.

Seeing things like this make me wish that I didn't live n an apartment building, or that there was space in my apartment building to grow things.  It would be so great to have something like this on the top of the MHC, where students can sign up for garden plots just like they can sign up for mailboxes.  We might even be able to put a greenhouse thing up there.  Maybe that will be a senior project of mine, even though they'd never let me do it.  =)  Anyway, I thought it was worth a look.  

Response to A Green City

I thought that the green city concept (in Singapore was SO beautiful!  It looked like they were living in a jungle.  I am a little sad that it would never be as green here, but unfortunately we don't live in an environment that can support that type of water-dependent plants.  I can see it still being pretty with a lot of the plants that we have here though.  My yard at home is "zero-scaped", meaning that it only consists of native plants.  It is very diverse and the plants grow so well, but that could be due to my mom's care.  She has a green thumb.  I can see using the plants that we have here to make a green wall, but it definitely wouldn't be the same color of green.  I think the idea of using native plants would really help children understand the history of the land, and it would help them realize that we do actually live in a desert.  Most people are barred from that reality by the green lawns of the city. 
I hope that one day Salt Lake will embrace our natural environment.  Part of that is daylighting the creeks, part of that is incorporating native plants into landscaping.  They are small steps, but we could be so much healthier if we had them behind us.  

Random tangent thought that I had in class yesterday: I really really really wish there was some way that we could start a student project on the roof of the MHC.  It is such a great opportunity for the Honors college to show how green their "green building" really is.  I would love it if there were a rooftop garden (hopefully some of it would be edible) where students could potentially get herbs and other plants for cooking.  More likely what would work is to put solar panels on the roof, but I like the idea of students being able to enjoy and use the space as residents, and a field of solar panels doesn't give me that.  Maybe if I continue to live in the MHC next year, I will be able to talk to people about putting something up there.  I dunno, it's just an interesting idea for a potential project.

Psychiatric Ward Designed by Patients

I found this article on how patients degined their own psychiatric ward.  It's a bit crazier than what Gui is planning to do with the school, but the idea is the same: let the people using the space design it.  Here's the link:
 http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2015/03/19/madlove_a_designer_asylum_from_james_leadbitter_the_vacuum_cleaner_is_a.html?wpsrc=sh_all_mob_em_top

I thought it was interesitng that their design included so much color.  I've visited someone in a psychiatric ward before, and they are very color-less places.  I don't know the reason for this, but I had always assumed that the colors would irritate patients with certain conditions.  However, the absence of interesing stimuli does seem like it would make the people who weren't already crazy crazy.  The room kind of looks like a child's playroom because it has a bunch of interesting stuff, and it's all in different shapes.  I look forward to hearing whether this room changes the behavior of the patients.  In general, I thought this showed the principles we were trying to work with, and it would be cool to implement something like that here at the university psychiatric hospital.

Progress Report

At this point in my project, I am mostly having trouble with artistic stuff.  I don't know how to make the colors look good together on the map, and I don't know how big to make the text in order to make it readable.  Some of my other designs are only text, not graphics, so I'd like to find a font that can work for both and also is readable from a distance.  I have some vague ideas about what I want the font to be, I am not sure which direction to go in.  As soon as I get the color scheme and font issues worked out though, I think I will be able to start printing the graphics, which will be really exciting!  I still have to look for locations to put them in, but I was thinking my process for that would be just walking around campus with them on a nice day and putting them in areas I think get a lot of foot traffic or are in a good location to point out the campus' relationship to cars.  I am also thinking of doing a graphic of all the roads in the U.S.  The idea is that if you took all the roads in the U.S. or maybe half of them or something and devoted that land to farming and agriculture instead you could feed __% of Africa, or you could feed ______ state. It's supposed to imply that the space used for cars could be used to solve a major world issue.  This one will be more calculation intensive than my last map, so I'm a little more intimidated by it.  But yeah, I have high hopes.  

Sidewalks

I know this is again a little off track, but I wish there was some way to draw attention to the sidewalks on campus, and how many of them there are that serve no purpose.  Like how the signs all contradict each other and tell people they can't walk in this spot, but you can walk 3 feet over from where you wanted to.  What especially angers me are the cars on campus.  They drive around like they own the sidewalk, and they park wherever they want.  I saw a CenturyLink car parked in the middle of the lawn today, just idling, crushing the nice grass and making lots of noise.  Can't the U ask the people they hire to fix things to be a little more considerate?  Just because they were hired for an on campus job doesn't mean that they can exploit every person, place, and resource on campus to make their job as easy as possible.  People live here.  It's an organism, and the people who work here, like the CenturyLink guy and the construction workers don't care or understand that people live here.  They don’t care about the health of this campus, they aren't invested in it.  They are just here, and they perform their job without caring about the health of the place they have been hired to improve.  It’s not their fault, they have no reason to care.  But the U should care, and they don't.  Now there's probably a lot about the process the workers here go through that I don't understand, so I'm trying not to be too bothered by it.  (Sigh).

The Shifting Center

For the past few weeks I have felt the center of the University of Utah shift because of the warm weather and because of the new student life center.  It feels like the center was at the Union before, but now it seems like if I were to randomly run into someone it would be at the student life center.  I guess it's a bit too late to change the venue now, and that's okay, but this week I have been surprised at how much I find myself gravitating toward the SLC.  On the other hand, ASUU elections are going on, and people are campaigning all over campus.  It's become clear that having a social gathering space in the Marriott Plaza is still important.  I think the reason all these groups choose to base their outreach at the Marriott Plaza is because of the performing capacity of the library as a social and academic hub.  If we could find some way to bring the blooming social space inside the library into the plaza, I think we would achieve our goal.  I hate to forget that there are other locations on campus that could impact people in a totally new way.  What we are trying to do in Marriott Plaza is extend the social spaces that bubble at its edges, like the library and the union.  However, places on upper campus remain unused and neglected because normal commuter students have no reason to go up there.  As a resident, I understand that great things could happen when classes and residential settings start to mix, but I also understand that there is nothing to draw people to upper campus.  I would say that it's an underutilized space, but I think the university will probably expand its teaching buildings up there in the next ten years or so.  That makes me sad, because almost certainly it will be disruptive to the natural and historic beauty that exists in the area.  I wish there was a way to incorporate learning into the existing structure of Officer's circle and the PHC area.  But yeah, that's all far fetched stuff that isn't really important to the project.