Category: Exercise 2.3

For my whole adult life, I’ve lived in major cities. First New York City, then San Francisco, and now Los Angeles. In NYC and SF, I had strong walking habits. During my free time, when the weather was nice or when I just felt an urge to explore and a restlessness in my legs, I’d head out on foot, sometimes walking up to 12 miles a day.

I intentionally walked because for me, the practice was one of seeing, rather than of getting to a destination. So standing at 5′ 3″, walking at a slow to moderate pace, I would look up, left, right, and down to the limits of my ability and attention. Some days, I’d notice the particular shape of a leaf on a tree. Other days, I’d sense changes in air texture, moisture and heaviness. Rain was coming.

In LA, my geographic ramblings are much more car-oriented. It’s partially to do with the sprawl of the city and its crisscrossing freeways. And, the other part is cultural. It is simply strange to see people walking when most people are car-bound.

I felt this acutely on this mapping project, which I did in a combination of foot and car. On foot entirely, I would have been constrained to a very small area, or I would have walked all day to cover the spread I desired. What I wanted was to find a balance of breadth and detail.

Something that occurred to me while on foot was how clean the streets are in my area. I’ve been in LA only about half a year, but long enough to take for granted streets uncluttered by litter, feces and bodies and unadorned with the scent of body fluids. In San Francisco, every left and right turn was an assault on the senses, with most scents carrying a medley of eucalyptus, stale alcohol and urine notes.

In this particular part of LA, where my nose lacked stimulation, my ears made up for it. The white noise! Almost everywhere, there’s a background hum of freeway traffic. Rarely honking, but occasionally tire squealing and sirens.

In my descriptions here and in the notes I jotted on the sketch, my observations are grounded in the framework of comparison. How does this environment I’m here in now compare to other environments from my past? What about my past experiences bias my attention to the very things I am calling out? To the question of “Can our observational faculties be trusted to objectively describe a familiar environment?”, my answer is a resounding no.

For this project, I started at home and I walked outside. I started following the directions that led me on this epic journey. I found myself in places I have never seen in my neighborhood. There were so many different areas of my neighborhood that went unexplored. When I got home I immediately start recording my journey.  I had this weird feeling of nostalgia even though I just got back from the walk. The emotions I was feeling during the walk is what was reflected on the drawing. I remember how I felt more clearly over the physical environment that surrounded me.  There were certain artifacts and people that stood out. You can see those people and things more predominately in my drawings. These people and artifacts are what invoked that emotion during that certain period of the walk. For example, I drew the kids playing at the park and the loud truck that zoomed past me. I used bright yellow to show the difficulty of walking up a steep hill and then sun and clouds when I was enjoying the view on the downhill section.

 

I chose to do this exercise leaving from home. Although I am pretty familiar with my neighborhood, the directions took me to surprisingly unseen places. First of all, it was a pretty cold day (in the 30s). At one point my hands were shaking so much I could barely hold the pencil. However, I still loved going out on a beautiful Autumn sunny day (I’m still not bothered by the cold at this time of the year – wait until February :-)).

The interesting thing about this exercise was trying to find things to capture after seeing very similar things. Example: with the directions of the exercise I was taken to a very residential area with more houses than buildings. One thing that caught my attention was the signs around these houses where parking is private and I never cared to pay attention to. Overall, great exploration exercise that makes you use fast and slow thinking.

I decided to do this exercise this morning, when it was quite sunny. I ended up going on a trail that leads to the beach. I enjoyed this exercise as I love to walk around the area I live in. It is quite picturesque once you cross the main street. The instruction exactly did that and took me away and then got me back to the starting point.

Since it was a sunny day, I saw quite a few people outside engaging in recreational activities – cycling, walking their dog, picnic, running. I could feel and see that the season has changed as there were a lot of broken, dried leaves everywhere and pine cones fallen here and there.

I also had a chance to see some wildlife – wild hare and humming birds and monarch butterflies.

In the end I was back to the beginning, to human habitation – I saw an unusually large number of construction cones but no sign of construction workers, I guess they were prepping for taking on the task. 

 (original image)

I mapped my route around my apartment, which is generally quiet. I am surrounded by apartment complexes, a public storage unit and the USPS. Since I am usually at home on off hours, it isn’t too busy.

As I continue walking down the street and get into the busier intersections, I will start to hear louder sounds (honking, cars) and smells (foods/restaurants/sewer/trash). There will be groups of pedestrians that walk in droves, usually timed with a metro stop. These people walk together in a cluster and eventually disperse as they walk pass each intersection. Since commercial buildings and businesses are 2-3 blocks from my apartment, I will be walking north, toward a crowded space, voices/shouts/laughter are other sounds that I hear.  Visually, I’ll also see lines for entering/exiting cars in parking and lines for people looking to eat at tasty restaurants.

I chose to walk out of the side entrance of my work complex after work, one evening, as it gave me the best options to see interesting things (the front is one big parking lot). It was a cool day, so the ground was starting to get crunchy after a few nights close to freezing.

The directions took me towards a private park within our office complex. It has a beautiful walking track around the entire park, a duck pond, and small wooded area. In this rapidly darkening evening, the wooded area felt more like a forest as the leaves haven’t fallen enough yet to let light through. My biggest observation is how quiet it is on one side of our work complex vs the other. As you pass through the wooded area, you can imagine yourself in another world almost (as long as you don’t look back!). The silence is broken by the occasional aircraft taking off overhead, and by a family of ducks kept fat by the neighborhood families that visit here. Overall, the exercise was tough because Tulsa is not a walkable city, so the option of work or home gave me limited opportunity to explore as much as I’d hoped this would. In future, it would be nice to remove that constraint, as there are some beautiful parks and neighborhoods I could have explored otherwise.

I live in an apartment complex adjacent to a large retail shopping district and a few miles from John Wayne airport. I wanted to highlight and contrast the qualities of the world inside my gated community and outside of it. We are next to a major street and a busy intersection where cars occasionally speed down. If you listen closely you can hear planes approaching the airport. To reach my apartment I pass through 2 locked barriers that can be opened either by a transponder, or by entering a code on a keypad. Inside the gates you can get see a manufactured sense of community. Lampposts resemble streetlights seen in a historic district even though this community is less than 5 years old, manicured lawns and hedges. It’s not uncommon to see people walking not just one but two dogs at a time. And during this awkward time of year between halloween, thanksgiving, Christmas and veterans day you can see a mishmash of holiday decorations fighting for attention. Some which have been leftover from Halloween and some laid out way to early for the upcoming holidays.

This exercise led me outside of my neighborhood, and onto the Walnut Trail. I walked quite a bit around the area, and there was a lot to observe. There were lots of people on the trail, from elderly couples to parents teaching their child how to ride a bike. There were also quite a few dogs on the trail, because it connects to the Flagstone Park. The trail also has a train that goes right by it, which is fairly loud. As I walked around, I also realized the trail goes above a road, where the cars go 60 mph. It was very loud as I walked around the trail, but it made it feel very “alive”. I took many turns during the trip, which led to realizing that the trail connects to other sidewalks and around plazas near the area.

My journey began at the entrance of Taekwondo academy. My son finished his taekwondo lesson, and we proceeded to follow the map through surrounding the academy. He called it treasure map. As instructed, we walked into buildings and stores; we have moved across through the mall, all the way to the other side. Although we have visited this mall many times before, we had never been to the outer area.

The area around Taekwondo academy was filled with a delicious smell. My son who had just finished exercising moved to the left in front of the bakery. The bakery was full of the children in their taekwondo clothes. There were shops selling decorations and the sound of the song playing in the direction we were instructions to move in.

While moving according to the instructions, it seemed that the sense of smell and hearing reacted faster than the sense of sight. Whenever I passed some spaces, I thought I wanted to eat something or to buy something for Christmas. It was an opportunity to think about the natural boundaries of the area.

 

The most striking observation from this experience for me was how obtrusive the apartment buildings began to feel. The buildings populate the complex so densely that often my path was determined more than anything by where I physically would be able to make a turn at all without hitting the broadside of a building. I used the reverse steps in my favor to permit a turn which led me to the doorstep corridor of another building to occur without trapping me in the space. Additionally, the lack of landscaped space became glaringly apparent as I looked for landmarks to identify on my map, but was faced only with more apartment buildings.

I began this exercise from my home, right after work. I have recently moved and fairly new to this area. I also barely walked around the neighborhood and mostly drive the distance between home and work. I began walking inside the parameter of my apartment community, and the exercise’s directions led me towards the streets outside of my residence community. The late hour, darkness and my unfamiliarity with the area made me scare a bit at first. At the beginning, wandering in the streets of Irvine was a little confusing, especially since I was trying very hard to identify something interesting to use as my decision point. Later, I decided to reduce my walking speed and began pacing with the intent to enjoy my surroundings.

Soon after changing my speed and spending some time pacing around I began noticing the buildings and structures that I have never paid attention to before. They all are designed beautifully and it surprised me how I have missed them during my daily commute to and from work. Most buildings near my neighborhood is very well designed (i.e. artistics arcs over the front gates and doorways, trees, plants and other greens in front of the buildings), and I am still in shock how I have missed these scenes while driving by them in daily bases. Soon after, I realized that I stopped following the original instructions from the exercise and am creating a path in the opposite direction of the suggested path. This was because I became curious to further explore beautiful things I saw, and I lost track of original instructions. Later, I returned to the point where I began deviating from the original instructions of the exercise and continued my path according to the exercise’s guidelines. This exercise was very useful to me when exploring my neighborhood, since I found places that I were not aware of at all and would have never find out about them if it was not for this exercise.

Later I arrived at an apartment community not far from where I currently live, realizing that I have been walking around this neighborhood for nearly 3 hours, without realizing it.

At first I kept getting stuck in my neighborhood, but eventually I made it out and stumbled upon the town center. After walking by a bunch of houses in the beginning, I started to notice the different styles of decorations in the front yards, ranging from different styled lights to different statues. I also ended up exploring parts of the neighborhood I have never set foot on.

What was really interesting was the town center, it had decorations and artifacts that I did not know was there. The experience itself was refreshing, at first it seemed tedious as it seemed like I would just be looping around residential areas. But about halfway through the assignment it started to get more interesting.

For this exercise, I took the directions literally when I came across any bifurcating path that I came across. I began at my home and ended up at the Library at Vanguard University. I ignored any routes that would cause me to trespass or break the law. I noted my environment as drawing.  I decided to take my camera, and documents whatever I saw at various intervals, either if I saw something interesting, or if I came to a new direction. I felt like Lee Friedlander, as he walked across NY and photographed various people. In my case, I encountered less than a handful of people in my 40-minute walk, the walk felt more therapeutic than anything.

An observation I made, is that the area I live by has a lot of long roads that seem to go on forever. I was afraid that I would walk clearly across the city, but luckily there were many small paths that I could follow. I had to make a slight modification to the instructions as I added an extra right, I had to do this or my route would have ended very shortly. I found it ironically that my last path took me to a door that stated ‘This is not an Entrance.’ At times I felt like I was peeking into peoples lives, as I was exploring an area that was unfamiliar, and I had an opportunity to see how people live in this area of the city.

 

 

Click for Slide Show

The starting point for this exercise was my apartment in Irvine, CA. It felt great to be outside. It was around 70 this morning – typical SoCal weather in November. As I walked around the neighborhood, I paid more attention to the architectural details on the townhomes near my unit and the various greenery surrounding the area. I never noticed how intricate the tip of the townhomes looked. There were also palm trees everywhere along with a few bunnies that popped in and out of bushes. Many neighbors hung American flags outside and there were still remnants of Halloween decoration near the front doorstep. A few neighbors were out and about walking their dogs, but the majority of the neighboorhood was very quiet for a 10 AM on a Saturday.

One interesting thing I learned was that I lived near a construction/waste management area. There’s a black gate near the south perimeter of the neighborhood. Outside the gate was a bike trail known as the Peter Canyon’s Trail. Across the bypass, I could see tall metal equipment. There was a foul smell in the air from the trash/landfill. A neighbor walked past me and noticed I was sketching. She thought I was bird watching.

I found this exercise very therapeutic, and it’s nice to take in our surroundings every now and then without the interruption of social media or our phones.

Overall, I would say I enjoyed this exercise, it got me to go outside and see my neighborhood in a new way, like many I never stopped to looks at where I lived turn by turn, frame by frame. For me the time of day was interesting, it was a relatively quiet afternoon, it seemed so quite and ready to be observed. I learned how formitiable force cars are in my neighborhood. I know we all think of LA as a car centric city, but I had become blind to them in my neighborhood. They are everywhere, in each of my frames of observation. To me this was disconcerting, cars have become ubiquitous and they do so much harm.

For this exercise I took a walk with my son & dog on a very rainy Saturday. I had hoped the weather would clear this week but instead I had my choice of “spitting” “rainy” or “pouring,” a common Portland, Oregon dilemma. My walk as much an interaction with my two companions as the space itself, and we took our prompt both to set our route to our neighborhood park, and it shape our activities playing and scootering along with way. At each direction I stopped and took notes, and the process of observation & documentation shaped the experience nearly as much as everything else.

While I think I may have completed this exercise differently than my cohort,  it felt like the best way to capture the experience of our walk about the neighborhood. It is something we have done many times, and it remains a constant part of our lives, but also constantly changing as our son grows up, the dogs age and change and the neighborhood, where we have lived for 10 years, grows and changes as well.

 

The start of this exercise leads to my indoor patio. Using my patio as a personal sanctuary, I have a statue of Buddha meditating cross-legged to harness positive energy. It serves as a place for me to sit in the morning, be alone with my thoughts, and attempt to clear my mind.

My journey continues outside of my home and into the neighborhood, I feel a sense of absence given I usually have my phone with me and I’m either listening to music, a podcast, or talking on the phone. Following the instructions takes me to all the familiar spots around my neighborhood, albeit out of order. I hear the faint sounds of cars on the nearby freeway overpowered by the chirping of birds. The morning carries on with it a gentle breeze and I can see families walking with their children and/or dogs. As I walk by the community pool I can see an insect trapped in a spider web on a tree.  Across from the pool area, I hear the sounds of a ball hitting a tennis racket where a pair of early risers are engaged in a friendly match. I walk up the hill and see homes with their Halloween decorations donning their front door. Once on top, I pause to take in the view of the morning sunrise overlooking the city. What a beautiful place I live. I’ve been here countless times before but today seems different. It’s amazing how your surroundings stay the same, but your experience of it changes once disconnected from the daily distractions.

I live in a gated community so the internal area can seem quite homogenous and manicured with residential plans manufactured and unified by the vision of the architect and builder who designed it. The conscious organization implies a level of order and uniformity. Unsurprisingly, the lines of still cars and parking spaces reinforce the orderliness. It’s an idyllic and quiet place to retreat from the bustle of the city.

Following the directions, I soon found myself venturing past the gates, which introduced added layers of complexity to the suburban area. That isn’t to say it differed drastically so. Certain areas seemed to follow the same aesthetic I was already quite familiar with, but interspersed were buildings that opened to a cultural center, to places of worship, to gas stations, and rows of more homes—many of which were very aesthetically similar. Palm trees were a frequent sighting, often forming lines across busy streets. Canopies of trees would border blocks of residences and decrease from view across heavy commercial intersections where the largest instances of greenery came in the form of timed traffic lights. The whirr of cars gave way to pockets of quiet where the unique architecture of private establishments for the gathering of people arose in open, public spaces. Small parks proliferated, offering a contrast of controlled nature against urbanized sites that housed petrol stations with mobile pay machines.

I enjoyed the long stroll, moving from high-density traffic areas to quiet and peaceful pockets, where, for instance, a small street vendor would sell fruits and smoothies, and people would settle to relax or play or retreat. I don’t think observational faculties can always be trusted to objectively describe a familiar environment because I can only see the world through my lens of experience, and it is unlikely that the worlds we carry in our heads are alike in every respect. Our perspectives give way to a subjective nature of truth—even what we frame in our observations are codified by what we choose to see and describe.

I performed this exercise with my house as the departure point. I’m very familiar with the streets in this neighborhood, but I haven’t been outside on foot awhile because it’s cold (it was 35 degrees when I did this exercise).

As such, the temperature was the biggest factor in my observations. There were no other people out, so everything I took note of were objects and seasonally related, like the kinds of pumpkins on porch steps, different ways of storing firewood, and how the leaves have fallen completely off of some trees but not others.

The most interesting part of my brisk walk was how I could hear a lawnmower, which seemed ridiculous to me, but I never saw it. That got me thinking of certain neighbors who were incredibly vigilant with keeping up with yard work all summer long, but seemed to be having a losing (or maybe even forfeited) battle with leaves. I don’t blame them.

Now, off for some hot chocolate…

I walked around my neighborhood during the late morning on the weekday. As I have lived in this area for past 20 years, the walk didn’t take me to anywhere that I was unfamiliar, with but I noticed few things.
1) Noise. There was no single moment the silence took place. Whether it’s the exhaustion of the car, music from the car, construction, children screaming, dogs’ barking, human talking, birds’ chirping…, I was constantly surrounded by noise.
2) Air quality. This is a part of the LA things, and like many Angeleno, I don’t walk much. By walking, I noticed poor air quality. I think the dust from the constructions combined with the exhaustion of the car were making air quality much worse.
For these reasons, plus the weather of the day–it was a hot day–I cannot say I enjoyed the walk, but it was a refreshing experience to be able to see and notice things from a different perspective (eye level), as opposed to viewing things from the car.

Walking around downtown Glendale toward the end of the work day (3:50pm) was more harrowing than I would have expected. Being a pedestrian in this area is, inherently, a dangerous activity. With the quality of light and severe afternoon shadows due to the recent time change, visibility is diminished, making the environment even more dangerous. Cars tend not to look for pedestrians, they block crosswalks and roll through red lights to turn right. Most of the foot traffic was limited to the west side of the street where it was more shady and where there are taller office buildings, meaning more humans in need of their later afternoon coffee to finish out their day. The walk took me through parking garages and the back alleys of buildings that I hadn’t walked through before. They were mostly deserted and built of high walls of concrete. On one occasion, I expected to be shooed-away by a security guard as I sketched. Trying to sketch while being in a strange place, where I’m sure few loiterers are encountered, felt awkward and vulnerable. I can’t say I enjoyed it, but I did learn that there are more plants tucked away in areas I didn’t expect. It would be nice if there were seating to enjoy these rare outdoor areas.

It finally stopped raining in Tokyo today, so I spent my afternoon walking around the neighborhood trying to find inspirations.

To be honest, it was a little bit hard to get this started in the first 1 hour or so, but things got a lot easier once you get into it. Initially, I was being very selective, I was trying to find something nice to jot down, but I just couldn’t — just not feeling inspired enough.  Finally, I got to a point where I just had to force myself to become spontaneous, capture any thoughts as they come into my head, and sketched whatever things I found interesting.

I would say the exercise is definitely helpful as I have very different takeaways when compared this experience to Project 2: Mappings, Part 1. I started paying more attention to details, patterns, and recurring themes, which helps me distill my impressions and thoughts into a few key elements.