Authentic Travel Matthew Mindrup

Matthew Mindrup Program Director, Bachelor of Architecture and Environments

The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.

― Anthony Bourdain

In the cited quote, the former chef, author, and travel documentarian, Anthony Bourdain, encouraged readers to expand their knowledge about themselves and the world they live in through travel. To do this, Bourdain warned, there is a difference between serious travelling and aimless wandering. Travel isn’t always pretty, nor relaxing. When we travel, we can often feel like we had the rug pulled out from beneath our feet and must call on our wits to make sense of the different ways people organise their cities, prepare their food or celebrate the changing seasons of life. In this experience travel leaves marks on our individual and cultural memory.

Architects have long held the act of travel as an important undertaking in their education and development. Indeed, in late medieval Europe, a stone mason who completed their apprenticeship and graduated to the title of ‘journeyman’ was expected to complete their education by moving from town to town for three years as journée (day) workers. On this trip, journeymen would learn about different methods of design and construction while working for different masters in different workshops. The word ‘travel’ entered the English language during this time from the French travailen (v) meaning to make a journey and originally travail (n.) “labor, toil,” referring directly to these day workers traveling around Europe.

Beginning around the middle of the seventeenth century, young upper-class European gentlefolk including aspiring architects began embarking on travel tours around the Mediterranean. The term ‘Grand Tour’ to describe this educational excursion was first used in

the French translation of Richard Lassels’, Voyage or a Compleat Journey through Italy from 1670 wherein he asserts that any serious student of architecture, antiquity and the arts must travel through France and Italy to understand the intellectual, social, political and ethical realities of the world. On this journey, travel was typically accompanied by a chaperone and a guide known as a ‘bear-leader’ responsible for their cultural, literary, and artistic training. Therein, the grand tourist would have an opportunity to acquire things unavailable at home, lending an air of accomplishment and prestige to the traveller, including books, works of art, measured drawings, plaster casts, cork models, scientific instruments, and cultural artefacts.

Souvenirs, such as those acquired during a Grand Tour are objects taken from a place one visits as either a sign of a having been there or an aid to help the user remember a particular experience of the place. A souvenir is considered authentic when it cannot be obtained from any other location or producer. For this reason, a mass-produced Eiffel Tower salt and pepper shaker is less authentic than a concert poster taken off a wall in Rome or a handbag produced by a local artisan in Barcelona.

Designers also describe the design of architecture as a journey. For the Bauhaus Master, Paul Klee, drawing was akin to ‘taking a line for a walk.’ For an architect in particular, their journey to the proposed building site occurs in the imagination and their discoveries are made visible using a pen, pixel, or knife. In this situation, can the drawing or model an architect creates of a proposed design be compared to the souvenir? For the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa drawings are visual descriptions of the discoveries they found during the design process, and he draws because he ‘want(s) to see things, that’s all I really trust. I put them down in front of me on paper so that I can see them. I want to see and that’s why I draw. I can see an image only if I draw it.’ But then, is the model of a proposed structure whose forms and spaces are found everywhere on ArchDaily any different than the Eiffel Tower salt and pepper shaker? If we can answer no, what then is authentic travel in terms of design?

A bus tour of Europe can be an authentic form of travel if one wishes to engage in an ‘Authentic European Bus Tour’. But this would be comparable to letting your critic act as your tour guide through the design of your project. Any souvenir the designer acquires on such a tour will remind them less about the discoveries they made than the journey they took through the eyes of their critic. Conversely, a designer may wander aimlessly in their thoughts like a tourist who doesn’t bother to learn where they are and misinterprets a fountain as a swimming pool. Many of us have had a similar experience in our design education when a critic points out to a student that the building next to their day care centre design is not a church but a factory.

Echoing Bourdain, students, please travel. Your critic may be your guide, but they are not there to find souvenirs for you. Learn where and how you are at any place. This will give you clues how to look for authentic designs. Travel means being serious about your journey. It means taking risks and accepting that you will not know where you will end up. But what a great set of souvenirs you will have at the end.