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.