PLACE/SPACE

For me what most stood out were the examples Tuan used to illustrate his points in the reading, “Place and Space.” I liked when Tuan was dissecting how each sense is used to orient our selves in our own concept of place and space. I found his example of how music can have a sense of space very interesting, because I’ve definitely noticed a huge surge in the amount of music with an abundance of artificial space in it. Bands purposefully cloak their guitars/synths/samples in tons of reverb to gain that feeling of space in their music. I also felt that Tuan’s point about our experience of place and space being personal was very well illustrated by the figure on page 13. Tuan shows the reader how gender can define how we locate our selves in a place. The Eskimo women use trading posts as landmarks while the men use the coast to define their position in the world. The third point that immediately jumped out at me from the page was when Tuan mentioned how when the physicists Bohr and Heisenberg visited the Kronberg Castle in Denmark their perception of the castle differed radically depending on if they considered it Hamlet’s castle. Tuan illustrates how our perception of place is incredibly dependent on what context we place the place in.