Age of connectivity, architecture and travel

Lim Yeong-hwan The author is a professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design at Hongik University Social media is overflowing with architectural highlights everyone is supposed to see at least once. Newly opened museums, signature works by world-renowned architects and even small spaces hidden at the end of an alley in some city are endlessly shared. Before we ever arrive, we learn where to take photos, what time of day offers the most beautiful light and which framing will look most striking on a screen. We live in an age in which architecture is consumed first through images before it is experienced as actual space. In my younger years, one of the main goals of architectural travel was to see as many buildings as possible in a single day. I planned my routes through each city in advance to minimize travel time, and once I arrived at a building, I moved faster than anyone else. I tried to capture everything on camera — the building's exterior, its interior spaces, even the joints of window frames and the details of hinges. After spending the whole day moving through a city, I would return to my lodgings with hundreds of photographs. At the time, I believed that was the way an architect ought to travel: to see good architecture in person, analyze it and record as much of it as possible. An architect's journey is often called a "field survey" in Korean — dapsa, literally meaning to step onto a site and investigate it. True to that meaning, an architectural field trip is close to an act of analysis and documentation. But at some point, my memories of the spaces I had so diligently recorded began to fade. Even though I had countless photographs and materials, what came to mind were only the shapes of the buildings and the names of the architects. A journey I had taken to understand architecture was gradually turning into an act of collecting it. Louis Kahn and the rediscovery of travel My field trips became journeys again more than a decade ago, during a summer trip following the architecture of Louis Kahn (1901-1974). Kahn was one of the leading figures of 20th century American architecture, an architect who explored the essence of architecture through light, silence and the order of space. Until then, the goal of my travels had been to see as many buildings as possible. But that year, for the first time, I set out on a journey that followed "the time of one architect." Traveling from Philadelphia to Trenton and New Haven, and then on to the Exeter Library in New Hampshire, I began to look at architecture in a different way. What changed most of all was time. I sat for a long while on the lawn in front of Erdman Hall, a dormitory at Bryn Mawr College, watching people pass by. At the Phillips Exeter Academy Library, a landmark of modern library architecture, I spent half a day among its actual users. I enjoyed sitting at a library desk, organizing my travel schedule and idly watching the light move through the windows. One afternoon, lying on a bench at the small Trenton Bath House near Trenton, New Jersey, and looking up at the sky, a thought suddenly occurred to me. I had flown from the other side of the world to see this piece of architecture, but for the children in this neighborhood, it was simply an ordinary place to swim and shower on a Sunday afternoon. What was, to me, a kind of pilgrimage site — a work by Louis Kahn — was, for someone else, merely the backdrop against which an ordinary day passed. As I slowed down, moments I would once have passed by began to appear differently. The same was true of the house of Luis Barragán (1902-1988), which I experienced in Mexico City. Barragán, one of Mexico's most important modern architects, built the house in 1948 and lived there as a bachelor until his death. At a time when modern architecture focused on the logic of function and form, Barragán created a distinctive spatial experience that evoked emotion and memory through vivid color, light and sha...