Place is defined to be a location in a space that has a significant meaning to an individual through sense, sight, and sound . The University of Toronto Campus green lifestyle and architecture evokes place characteristics. The campus is seen as a learning environment to most students, and to me it’s the same, but can be adventurous too.
Each weekday, I will always walk through the SY building to get to most of my classes located in the Science Wing (SW). Before I reached the SY building, I walked through North Residence on campus. The North Residence is full of townhouses and trees surrounding those townhouses. The other on-campus residences are located on the south side of the campus such as the South Residence (closer to the residence office centre) and John Foley (closest to (MW)). From where I lived at North Residence, it only takes less than five minutes to arrive to SY building and another five to nine minutes to get to most of my classes that are located in Science Wing (SW), Humanities Wing (HW), and Academic and Resource Centre (AC). The one interesting thing about this campus is most buildings are connected to each other, so, it benefits students to avoid bad and cold weather. Due to the building connection, it open my eyes to see the campus much clearer in detail when walking through them every single weekday/weekend. I noticed each offered program and courses at UTSC has their own building; the Institutional Building is drawn for math students, the Science Wing is for science students, the Humanities Wing is for social science students, Arts and Administration Building is for arts and film students, and MW is for geography and city studies students.
The senses I noticed in my exploration on campus would be the senses that I encounter whenever confronting against a particular location or class on campus. The scent gives out the ability to know where through visual memory or in my case through smell. In the visual perspective is seeing the amount of students, the green life, the classes, the luxury of food each day. There is a fun fact about our brain and that would be we remember a place through our first encounter towards it. I am personally an expert in directions when I visualize what is around the destination, where others are experts on location names on campus. My ability to recognize the places I encountered in my first year led me to a less stressful state on finding where I was without being lost in this large (mini) campus. Lastly, the sound of laughter, excitement, people yawning, and stress from students enlighten the education environment vibe, to seem like a real campus. Also, the sound of different languages give out a diverse perspective on campus which is quite nice when the campus is fairly accepting. At the end of the day, no matter where people are around campus, everyone will have their own perpsective emotionally and visually about a particular location.
As beautiful and amazing it sounds to be on this campus, there is a place where all UTSC students think of as symbolizing a dungeon. That would be the basement of the Science Wing; looking like a horror location that you see in horror movies (if you enjoy horror movies like me than it’s less scary and more interesting to explore). The features that the basement has that makes it creepy and spooky would be the colors chosen; dark orange and brown. There is always that thought or feeling that something is going to happen unexpectedly. Although, most UTSC students do choose to study at this kind of environment, as I have seen when walking through the hallway to my classes. The classes downstairs are fairly empty, cold and can be limited from outlets.
