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tle from foreign programs, and experiential means of learning are un-derdeveloped compared to studio fabrications and representational in-ventions developed in isolated school environments.
By offering alternative visions to site-based travel pedagogy, my aim is to suggest theoretical and historical grounding for imprecise, experi-ential inquiry. Opening the field to feminist perspectives requires re-considering the grand tour tradition for architects and inviting self-constructed knowledge. Writings and drawings of previous sightseers, including ordinary citizens as well as privileged individuals, suggest re-visions both of subjects and methods of insightful inquiry. When ap-propriately engaged, young architects learn to challenge and finally to trust their own eyes and voices.
Relatively recently the advent of computers in the studio has intro-duced another phase of the false conflict between art and technology in architectural representation. A reevaluation of architecture practices and theories in light of new tools should resituate travel as critical to cultural constructions of architectural knowledge. Ways of seeing are continually enhanced by evolving tools, and although digital media for communication in architecture may be the latest, the need for physical comprehension and reflection brought about by direct experience of urban landscapes is constant. Documentation of personally discovered holistic qualities ought to transcend the desire for the true image toward a more complex, if idiosyncratic, understanding.
Travel pedagogy raises concerns for pace, the appropriate learning time for information gathered through experience to become knowl-edge. While at once challenging the full immersion model of studio-based pedagogy, learning abroad depends on the same rigor, focus, critical inquiry, attention to detail, and visualization through creative output as is typical of the design studio. Yet knowing the city as a work of art composed of built artifacts also requires patience to observe funda-mental relations of people to places. Hannah Arendt’s sense of libera-tion expressed in response to her direct contact with human values and public realms provides the sublime pleasure of self-knowledge actually and essentially acquired abroad. Self-understanding is unquantifiable, as are links between social practices and cultural spaces, so these topics of learning tend to be peripheral to, if present at all in, engineering-based curricula.
Already my argument gives rise to an inherent conflict between sys-tematic versus imprecise methods, both calling for a charted course with a clear direction and acknowledging the need for free, inventive, non-linear paths. While confronting this paradox, loosening required design studio sequences and charging the students with more responsibility for individual growth can begin to provide the necessary means for suc-cessful engagement beyond the bounds of the classroom. Interdiscipli-nary foundations of knowledge through contact-based methods require a renewed commitment to the time, labor, and resources necessary for a comprehensive sense of architecture’s influence on the human condi-tion. Experience-centered research models that require travel depend in part on connecting theories of vision with the development of tools for interrogation and critical site inquiry, especially writing, photogra-phy, and drawing.
Yet institutionalized study abroad remains peripheral to architectural academics. First, travel pedagogy is relatively weakly supported by aca-demic institutions, which struggle with cumbersome bureaucracies that confuse curricular interests. Thus students receive too little intellectual andfinancial encouragement and have too few options for study abroad in architecture. Second, considering Italy-based architecture programs, which have grown in quantity and size during the past thirty years, too few engage the resources of foreign scholars, architects, and local insti-tutions of higher learning. Although some schools have contracted with foreign faculty, few programs offer serious site engagement with the con-temporary issues of Italian architecture and public space.1 Too often, Rome and Florence are treated as museums for historic reliquary in-stead of vital communities with housing needs in addition to those sig-nification-absorbed monuments. Finally, examination of the products of U.S. and Canadian abroad studies programs in Italy reveals the dilemma of experimental methods and uncertain theoretical foundations for ar-chitecture’s junior year abroad.2The loose connection between field trips, historic analyses, cultural studies, and studio problems and a lack of integration with the home campus curriculum limit the reinforcement of knowledge gained abroad.
The promising evidence that North American universities have re-cently increased abroad initiatives, including those in non-Western Euro-pean countries, contributes to the need for more reflection and critical
evaluation of alternative site pedagogy. While all experimental models should be encouraged, scholars must evaluate and refine investigative experiential practices. This chapter is aimed at reinforcing and revising the role cultural identity, visual studies, and deep inquiry can play in such scholarship, although it may complicate rather than simplify the means for knowing “great” places. This calls for an integral understand-ing of cities and landscapes as formal, social, public, and historic mon-tages while accepting that those places must continue to change.
Perhaps by reviewing how architects and scholars have historically gained knowledge through travel, new critical models and tools will emerge. For architects, direct site contact with “foreign” architecture has since antiquity been a source of inspiration and formal ideas from which to build and to write theories of architecture. The history of the grand tour, the rite of passage that for several centuries shaped the edu-cation of nobles, philosophers, writers, and architects, offers precedence for contemporary travel as a part of architectural education. Writing from observations made away from home has liberated learning about real places in present time from authoritative dictates and served to in-spire future visions. The fertile travel sketchbooks of great modern ar-chitects such as Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Gunnar Asplund, and Louis Kahn are still being mined for insights into creative genius. That their education began or was advanced by firsthand experience of buildings and landscapes not native to them must be considered as foundational for the evolution of modern architecture. The avant-garde obsession with novelty and the deletion of history was short-lived, and the view that heroic cultural pioneers were in blind denial as they broke with tradition to usher in a new society is a modern myth. Including previ-ously unheard voices, especially those of minorities, women, and the very inhabitants whose homelands provided the sites visited and depicted by European men can revise the grand tour model. The resulting cho-ruses may introduce unique perceptions and raise useful questions about the diversity of our visions of architecture.
Modernity has not erased the significance of history for the scholar of architecture but has instead both magnified and blurred our vision of the past. Theoretical investigations of modern vision, observers’ tech-niques, and queries about the meaning of mechanical reproduction have challenged the authorities of Western perspectival space. Revolutionary
tendencies in art practices brought about when the Bauhaus emerged out of Beaux Arts tradition seem tame when compared to the social implications of television and the urban implications of the automo-bile but may lead to a deeper understanding of how spatial and cul-tural apprehension factored the represented image into what we build.
These developments merit study to help clarify how, why, and where architects travel. How various sights get seen, felt, and analyzed is tied to the broader cultural construct of Western representation. Architec-tural depictions from field study abroad continue to serve in the prop-agation of knowledge. Myriad methods for verbal and visual represen-tation, including, but not limited to, slides in history surveys, textbook graphics, writings of theorists and historians, publications and journals, pop culture’s postcards, and tourist snapshots, are all part of architectural culture, and they in turn influence how sights are envisioned. Unpack-ing and cross-referencUnpack-ing these collected images reveals how various rep-resentations communicate architectural ideas at home.
Shifting the focus from the theoretical domain of visual culture to the more quotidian, then, reveals other realities related to contempo-rary practice, schools of architecture, and economic structures. Most no-tably, architectural tourism has boomed within the last fifty years. The impact of curious visitors to houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park has brought some of their owners to post the international slash calling for “no tourism.” The desire for privacy among suburban dwellers is in conflict with a mobile, cultured population’s longing to see an original. In 1991 Architectural Record reported the concerns of John Julius Norwich, chair of the World Monuments Fund and author of The World Atlas of Architecture, who suggested that “tourism pollution”
raises so serious a threat that access to many sites should be restricted (Masello 1991, 68–69). Norwich, however, makes no suggestion or pro-vision for revenues lost by forgone entry fees, nor does he address is-sues of democratic access.3
Tourism is the subject of much contemporary cultural criticism and interdisciplinary study — as kitsch, as leisure, as marketing, as colonial imperialism, as cultural appropriation and exploitation.4In many places, the sacred journey of pilgrimage has been usurped by opportunities for economic advancement. Nostalgia-driven visitors who seek an “authen-tic” experience while yearning for a past perfected, a revised history,
pro-vide us with images of the souvenir-stuffed handbag and the disappointed tourist. Insatiable demands for photographic evidence may force the lens to get between the sight and the sightseer, who feels obliged to gather evidence, proof of his or her being there. Curiosity and observa-tion are overcome by the will to possess. The photographic souvenir re-duces the monument to a miniature scale and flattens bodily sensa-tions, diminishing an integrated physical response to a given place or experience.
Yet too little attention has been paid to the intellectual or spiritual quest of the contemporary traveler and the benefits of awe-inspired vi-sions brought home. It is worthwhile in this context to consider the work of architectural educators who have effectively addressed questions about the economics and cult value of tourism. Liz Diller and Ric Scofi-dio have done so in their creation of two works of art, one built and one published, that reveal inclinations in Western culture’s construc-tion of sight-seeing. Their 1991 installaconstruc-tion, entitled “SuitCase Studies:
The Production of a National Past,” includes a collection of depictions of American places framed by narratives, descriptions, informational vi-gnettes, and philosophical considerations.5Essentially, “SuitCase Stud-ies” demonstrates what is lost when the reproduction of representative images (the postcard) and words (site description or theoretical text) stands in for the actual experience of a place. Postcards are generic repli-cas of monuments in miniature, whose reversible front and back allow visitors to personalize a public place. Tourists’ frequent use of automatic cameras to duplicate postcard-quality souvenirs is indicative of the de-sire to satisfy a prescribed expectation, shaped and verified by commer-cially printed images. For this installation, the architects designed a for-mation of fifty suspended Samsonite suitcases, each pried open with mirrors positioned to reflect both sides of a single postcard, for simul-taneous viewing of the public picture and the personal note. Each piece of luggage was held in tension with a hinged apparatus ready to snap shut. The floating suitcase represented tourists’ “baggage,” the mute but weighty encumbrances of travel that symbolize the stereotypes and ex-pectations we carry with us and may keep us from seeing the sights we seek. Diller and Scofidio realized the scapegoat that tourism provides in the obfuscation of architectural content. In a subsequent publication, they explain their call for an affirmative look at tourism, one that
illu-Ricardo Scofidio. Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 8 February–22 March 1992. Photograph by Kevin Fitzsimons/Wexner Center for the Arts.
minates the “free play of space-time [and] which thwarts simple, binary distinctions between the real and the counterfeit, ultimately, exposing history as a shifting construct” (1994b, 53).
The viewer is brought to understand that sites that hold value for each culture are in flux. Travel’s liberation keeps history alive, not as a fixed tally of facts and tombs, but as habitable places with variable in-terpretations belonging to the onlooker. Diller and Scofidio’s illumi-nating, if somewhat disparaging, view of American tourism fed my own need to unpack the motivations, stereotypes, and obligations of archi-tects who share a common built culture.
My Point of Departure
I do not question the inherent value of the monuments, cities, and subjects that have constituted traditional in situ scholarship and grand tour routes for generations of architects. I simply find them to be in-complete. Nor do I prescribe a revised itinerary based on a theme to essentialize the right path or identify the specific places we all must know intimately. Instead, I am interested in framing questions about how places are experienced and what knowledge results from locally focused culturally informed architectural studies. Certainly ideas found by ob-serving new and old Rome, Paris, Cairo, Berlin, Chicago, Los Angeles, an Ohio courthouse square, or a rural village differ in content, cultural linkage, and even likely angles of view. It is not the specific sites one travels to see, however, but the restrictions in the methods of studio-based curricula that oppose fieldwork and deserve investigation.6Once the process of inquiry has been opened and scholars of architecture find themselves following a conceptual map on unfamiliar ground, new sites present themselves by demonstrating integral relations between appro-priate civic forms and the citizens who use them.
In addition to theoretical, historical, and cultural transitions in per-ception, technical conditions specific to architectural pedagogy require study. Fieldwork strategies depend on at least three processes of repre-sentation, verbal descriptions, photographs, and graphic sketches, that allow the observer to establish a personal, immediate, yet unhurried re-lationship with places explored. Site-specific engagement reveals intrin-sic meanings of architectural symbols, and those documentary studies
serve in creating images, narratives, and buildings that become rooted in collective memory. Interaction with inhabitants of a place, familiar-ity with their history, and time to observe changing seasons and day-light facilitate discovery when engagement is active. Lessons so synthe-sized are better comprehended. Feminist criticism and the perceptions of women as observers have contributed to the archives of our collec-tive memory by providing distinct, complex representations of places.
Architects attempting to broaden their understanding of humankind also seek to resituate the art of their craft in the world whose authori-ties are the use and exchange values of production. If travel is reposi-tioned beyond tourism and among other cultural institutions, especially cinema, theater, the novel, the essay, and the university, it may better serve to illuminate human dwelling:
Cutting across this art of travel and theater, of history and memory, lie the contaminated intertwinings but distinct classifications of high art and pop-ular entertainment, didactic illustrations and designed commodities, the oppositional aesthetic and the compromised, the pure or pleasural forms of architecture. These are the ways in which we frame the city, visually imagining its form and materially reconstituting its structure: by travel, in theater, at the museum, from the cinema, through its architectural compo-sitions. (M. Boyer 1994, 70)
The act of travel is leave-taking: going sufficiently far to feel a distinct distance from home. Geographic distance matters less than psycholog-ical distance, where perceived variations are physpsycholog-ical, often unexpected, and affect even daily activities. Consider bank lobbies or transport ter-minal ticket counters in cultures where people do not tend to queue up. Bus rides in Mediterranean metropolises often provide effective lessons about one’s sense of personal space. Olfactory sensations differ-entiate public markets in Rome from supermarkets in suburban malls.
Spatial tolerances, felt before they are acknowledged, identify a realm of consciousness inspired by the heightened sensitivity to everyday life experiences. Although “true voyagers are those who leave / to leave,”
gain or growth is best measured when the traveler returns home.7 Travel has long served as a metaphor for the quest for personal un-derstanding, progress, and knowledge. In Western culture, travel is al-ternately perceived as a means to pleasure, excitement, entertainment,
recreation and rejuvenation, an encounter with the exotic, liberation, discovery, and even conquest. To travel broadens one’s horizons. But the voyage also promises danger, conflict, struggle, uncertainty. Classi-cal journeys of Greek tragedy brought self-awareness, but not without costs. Medieval pilgrimage inspired by faith brought sacrifice and tra-vail on the road to salvation, where the destination was more certain than the way. Movement, whether physical or intellectual, and the metaphor-ical voyage assume a close parallel and imply disturbance; one can lose one’s way. Voltaire’s Candide, in which each character encounters the most brutal and unnerving misfortunes, concludes that it is preferable
“to cultivate our gardens” (1930, 144) than to seek fortunes away from home, but such wisdom was gained from direct encounter.
Histories of Travel: The Written Word
Grand tour narratives recorded excursions of the educated classes and the themes of the human condition they investigated. Common topics included consciousness of national identity, domesticity, deliberations about the best vehicles of transport, emotional responses to seeing new sights, personal encounters with others, satisfied or frustrated expecta-tions, and mapping and other devices for recording and orienting the traveler’s volatile course. Both Cesare De Seta, author of L’Italia del Grande Tour: Montaigne da Goethe, and George Van den Abbeele, in Travel as Metaphor, initiate their histories with Montaigne’s Italian ex-cursion, begun in 1580. Montaigne’s journey offered him political in-sights and personal developments that appear in the second volume of Essays, published in 1588 (Van den Abbeele 1992, 34). One French en-cyclopedia used his definition for the voyage according to three distinct categories, the third of which addressed experiential learning: “Voyage (Education.) the great men of antiquity judged that there was no bet-ter school for life than that of voyages; a school where one learns about the diversity of so many lives, where one incessantly finds some new lesson in that great book of the world; and where the change of air along with the exercise is of profit to the body and to the mind.”8
Reaping the benefits of travel is as much a commitment to the in-tellectual as the physical journey. Montaigne’s essay “On Idleness” warns not of immobility but of agitation: “The soul that has no fixed goals loses itself; for as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere” (Van den