Home

In my Art 102 class we recently worked on a project thinking about memory and home. I thought long and hard about what home means to me and what home actually is. For me home is not a single place or a single idea, it is all the places where I am completely free to be who I am. It is a place of love, beauty, happiness, safety, and freedom. It is embodied in places and people and one of these places is St. Olaf and the landscape that has created this campus is an integral part to how I relate home and St. Olaf. The buildings I see everyday walking to class, sleep in every night, study in, eat in and all the other buildings I have, do and will interact help create an image of home for me. My current dorm and the other two I have lived in function as my houses, places I have lived in (studying, sleeping, eating, hanging out, etc.). They tie me, more than any other building, to this campus, since I have spent most of my time there. Buntrock is a living room and a dining room to me; I spend a fair amount of my time there socializing, eating and studying. The windmill is a tie to my values and the first visible sign of campus when I am returning from being off-campus. Though there is no formal element involved in what here is for me it is about the memory instead. Yes Holland may be amazing architecturally and the whole magesterial gaze my embody ideals of the college, it is only the memory of how I interacted with these unconsciously that functions as home. The windmill still signals I am home whether I am looking up to it or down upon it.

Harry Potter

Last night was the release of the penultimate movie in the Harry Potter series, so SGA helped to sponsor a Harry Potter themed dinner in the caf. As I sat at the long rows of tables with floating candles, faculty sitting in their robes at the front, the high vaulted ceilings and the enormous windows, all reminiscent of the dining hall in Harry Potter, I thought about how we relate our campus to Hogwarts. You can almost always hear someone referring to how our campus in some way is like Hogwarts, whether it is our buldings, faculty in robes, or whatever else, everyone has made the connection at some point. We romanticize Holland Hall as a bulding straight of the wonderful wizarding realm and the library may also be drawn in to this comparison. It is interesting how we relate our landscapes to our fantasies, something we have seen in a mive or read in a book. Obviously the arhictects of St. Olaf were not thinking Hogwarts when they built the buildings (in fact most buildings were done before Harry Potter even came out in book or movie form), but we still imagine this to be true. We watch a movie and there is a whole world that enchants us visually, but also enchants us through our desire to be like the people in it. For whatever reason we find wizards fascinating and this moves us beyond just a visual enchantment with the films. We do not want St. Olaf to be Hogwarts just becasue Hogwarts is a beautiful castle, we also want it to be Hogwarts becasue this implies we are wizards and withces, we can do magic, we wear robes, there are owls, whatever part beyond architecture strikes your fancy. These parts of campus then stick in our head more, they mean more to us and contribute more to what here is. Though I am not the biggest Harry Potter fan there is and I generally try to avoid the hysteria surrounding it, there is a part of me that wants this all to be true: we really do go to Hogwarts. So in some way that is what here is to me. The landscape invokes images of other places and other times, in this case Harry Potter and the fantasy the not real becomes a part of a real idea

Snow

And so begins the second season of Olaf: winter, complete with snow, cold, and wind. The minute snow starts to fall on the campus the landscape is completely altered. What was barren trees and dying grass has been blanketed by a sheet of white. It is the signal of a semester coming to a close, Christmas Fest approaching, and the holiday season nearing. The landscape here at Olaf now reflects the many meanings that lie behind the symbol of snow. To me it says my time at Olaf is coming to a close for a little bit. The semester is winding down and soon I will be leaving Olaf for a while which is a bittersweet feeling. Snow also signals celebration and holiday. Soon thousands of people will descend on campus people will reconnect and be merry, so snow on the land gives me a joyous feeling reminiscing about past years here. Snow also allows people to make their own mark on the landscape soon you will see snowmen standing outside your windows, greeting you as you enter buildings, or doing whatever else, but they will be there invoking their own meanings on the landscape. So now that snow has fallen a whole new world is out there and St. Olaf takes on a new meanings to me.

Holland

Holland Hall is one of the most recognizable buildings on campus. Its castle like architecture makes it stand out from the rest of the buildings and along with the height it seems to tower over everything. The interesting thing about Holland is it gives you a different impression from every angle you view it. There is the view of it coming from the north side of campus which is impressive. The building only has three visible floors at this point but it still stands above you, looming as you approach it. The hill drops off to your left invoking a magisterial gaze; you have the power of the gaze combined the power of Holland culminating in quite the sensation. Then you have the view coming up the hill from the East. From here you can see Holland rise up from the hill it is built into, in all of its glory. It creates quite the welcome as one approaches campus. The reverential gaze is in full force as you look upon the building. The final view is one that I rarely encounter but when I do it astounds me. This view is the one you encounter when you leave Old Main or the eastern doors of Regents. From this angle you can view the full power of Holland on the landscape. The building is built into the hill working in conjunction with the land but clearly standing up and against it. It mirrors the massive conifers that rival the building in stature. This angle gives you the full scope of reverential and magisterial. The power of St. Olaf landscape and the philosophy of St. Olaf building with nature is encompassed in this building

Lawns

Reflecting on the reading about lawns I was thinking how much I associate an amazing green lawn with some sort of eliteness. One thing I find intriguing is how a lawn is an ideal yet at the same time it is taken for granted on campus. I would bet a good amount of people on this campus grew up in homes with nice green lawns. I would also bet a good amount of people would list the lawns around campus as a good aesthetic touch and that without the lawns Saint Olaf would be a very different place, probably for worse. Yet hundreds of people every day cut across the lawns, in the name of saving time, marring the campus. I just find it curious how this value of a green lawn does not transfer over to campus. Granted probably not all the people cutting across the lawns had a lawn and do not place the same value on it but I still find it interesting.

My dad loves to garden and so we have always had a great lawn; a combination of flowers and gardens and green grass. I have grown up with a lawn around me and in some way there is an element of home in a lawn. A lawn can be a place to lay down or a place to run on. I love lawns as landscape or I guess I love green space whether it be a lawn or an actual field or forest. The lawn always has posed an interesting problem for me as an environmentalist though. It is essentially this huge monoculture and many lawn enthusiasts load their lawns with fertilizers, herbicides, and other harmful chemicals, but at the same time it is preferable to concrete or any other man made inorganic surface.

I have thought a lot about what my first post should be and what would be fitting to start off with and I have decided I should first make a quick list of the places I spend the most time in/looking at and why I spend a lot of time there.

1. Ellingson Hall Room 106: This is my house, I am a JC in Ell and so spend a good deal of my time in my room so I can be available for my residents. I do homework in my room often I work a lot better there as long as the homework I am doing does not require a table to spread my stuff on.

2. The Windmill (as a focal point) My gaze is consistently drawn to the windmill, whether I am walking somewhere, sitting in class, or eating a meal in Stav. The windmill does tower over everything and it is also dynamic most of the time drawing my attention away from a smaller stationary building. I also appreciate the meaning of the windmill as a landmark of home and as a testament to sustainability.

3. The Windmill and Natural Lands: I spend a good deal of my time walking and running around this area. I cannot stand running indoors so the natural lands is my place of choice to go for a run. I also walk around the land quite a bit. It is a wonderful place to get lost, think, and de-stress for a while.

4. The Library: I do some studying in my room but also spend a fair amount of time studying in the library as it is conducive to diligent work and lots of room to spread out and study.

5. Gazing at Holland Hall and the surrounding northward view from Regents 3rd floor: I am a biology major and have had labs on the 3rd floor of Regents every year. When I am bored in lab my eyes tend to drift towards this view of looking North, with Holland, conifers, and the power plant all in view. I appreciate the aesthetic value of Holland as this fantastic ideal combining a longing to live in many novels and movies and the sheer grandeur of this castle like building. The towering conifers and the way the hill start to drop of reminds me of living in the mountains which adds to the power of the scene. This view combines my reverential gaze of the buildings and magisterial gaze of looking over the land and feeling as if I am on a mountain.