Due: Post by Tuesday, March 3, class time.  Come to class prepared to summarize your essay for discussion.

Assignment: Write an essay, about 1500 words, discussing a particular place that you know first-hand. The essay should include discussion of something in the readings (Kunstler, Waldie, Jackson) and a relevant scholarly article.  You may also do a visual project (see below); if you spend a lot of time on it, you can write less, say 1000 words.

The place could be a building, a neighborhood, a street, a block, a museum, an architectural exhibit, etc. If possible, visit the place and take some notes and photographs.

For ideas about places, check out the Places to Go page; for suggestions about exhibits, check out the calendars on the side bar, especially the AIA-NY and MCNY calendars.  You can see what the students did with a similar assignment here, and for a related assignment with projects, here.

The essay should develop a clear theme about the place. Some questions to consider: What kind of place is it—to what category of places does it belong, and how does it compare to others in the category? What are the most striking elements of the place? What is strange, elusive, surprising about the place? What issues of place (as discussed in the readings) does the place involve? How did people shape the place, and how does the place shape people? What aspects of the place did the scholarly article and course readings make you think more about?

You probably won’t find a scholarly article about the place itself, so look got an article that’s relevant in some other way—an article about the type of place you’re looking at, or about a theme you’re discussing. For help finding an article, see the website on doing research using electronic sources, and check out the library's tutorial and help pages.  The citation formats for outside sources is here.  At the end of the essay, include a "Works Cited" with a bibliography for the article you used; embed a link to the article in the title—don't use the full URL.

In terms of space and emphasis, think approximately along these lines: 25% describing the place, 25% developing connections to the readings, 25% discussing the scholarly article, and 25% on your personal angle to the place—your memories of the place, a story about it, a description of what happened when you visited it, etc.  These parts needn't be separate and distinct—everything might be blended together.

Location: Locate the blog post on the map. The instructions are here.

Images: As with your blogs, include an image at the beginning of the post. If you want to include more images, you can do a slide show, or insert images at various points in the post, or put the extras all at the end. They can be your own images or they can be taken from the web, but please remember to include the URL for the image source page when you do in the inserts.

Optional Project: In addition to the paper, you may also do some kind of visual or creative project. For example, you could think along the lines of what an architect, landscape historian, or urban planner might do, e.g., a 3-D model, an architectural rendering, a portfolio of photographs and drawings, box paintings (check these out), a video, etc. Or it could be something playful, like playing with lego.  It would be helpful if you also took some photographs of your model or scanned your drawings and included the images in your post.