This Place We Call Home

            The landscape we know as Fairbanks consists of an unusual balance of the beautiful and the unsightly.  At no time is Fairbanks as a whole entirely beautiful, and at no time is it really that ugly.  Without a cohesive urban core, the grid structure that defines a city, and sharply cuts any natural landscape, spreads far and wide.  But even within that grid, despite its disturbance of a beautiful natural rhythm, there lies a certain calming pattern, rhythm, and beauty all its own.

            This effect can be seen from a campus lookout just above the Patty gymnasium.  Here, you can watch as the sun rises and sets, sending the entire expanse of wilderness from there to the Alaska Range into a glow of yellow, orange, and pink.  From the same spot, you can look down a path to the power plant and see its stack billowing smoke.  But it is when you looks out to the right and sees Chena Ridge, and the Chena River, which eventually leads to the Tanana that it all fits together.  The road on the ridge is shaped by the ridge in the same way the river is shaped by the ridge.  The buildings on campus are all worshipping the sun in the same way a plant would, each with its face directed to receive maximum energy.  It turns out, that no matter how we cut it up, we can’t escape the fact that we are indeed a part of the landscape.

            It is when we enter a place of human creation entirely that we can see the true human landscape.  From the edge of the food court in the Wood Center a whole range of human creation can be viewed.  From the very functional food court itself, though even that is adorned with elements, such as wood floors, to improve the quality of the landscape.  This place is designed as a place for students to relax.  In the student lounge area, a birch forest painted on the wall brings the natural world inside.  A backgammon board painted on the table reminds us that this is a place to relax, and unwind.  In such a well-crafted building, the landscape doesn’t stop at the doors and windows, but is welcomed in.

            From the top of Ester Dome looking to the north we can see even more of the interactions of humans with nature.  The ski runs cut into the side of Moose Mountain remind us more of water flowing down a hill than they do of the typical grid work of human development, yet there is something strikingly unnatural, though particularly beautiful about the way that hill looks compared to the rest.  Those who know where to look can find the remnants of a rope tow towers and hemp rope that once hauled skiers up Ester Dome to ski the runs that had been cut into that hill.  Those runs have all but disappeared.

            The marks made by humans affect every landscape.  Even if we were able to view a perfectly virgin landscape, in viewing it, we would bring a whole range of human experience to our interpretation of it.