Age of connectivity, architecture and travel

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

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 shadow. For that reason, the Barragán House came to be regarded as more than a residence — it became known one of the most poetic works of 20th-century architecture — and was designated a Unesco World Heritage site in 2004.

Yet his house, set in an ordinary residential neighborhood, was not easy to recognize even from just outside. With its high stucco walls and closed facade, it was the sort of place one might pass without a second thought. But the moment I opened the door and stepped inside, an entirely different world unfolded. There, I did not raise my camera. Instead, I walked slowly through the house, trying to follow Barragán’s gaze. I watched how the warm sunlight entering through gridded windows reached into the space and where it stopped, and wondered why this silent space felt so strangely comfortable. It was a moment of experiencing his architecture not as an image, but through every sense in my body.

Travel as social media proof

Modern architecture exists both as real space and as an image on a screen. The problem, however, is that images have begun to replace experience. People visit cathedrals, museums, squares and landmarks, and leave behind photographs in front of them. Architecture is consumed less as a place to inhabit than as a backdrop for a picture, while travel itself has become less an experience than a process of proving that one was there.

Travel once offered us a brief period of disconnection. The unfamiliar sensations we encountered while walking through a strange city were possible only in time set apart from the routines of everyday life. But now, even at our destinations, we encounter architecture while constantly connected. Perhaps we are already looking at those moments as scenes to be shared with someone else.

Good architecture reveals itself little by little the longer we remain with it, and it continues to live on in memory long after time has passed. That is why architectural travel finds its greatest value not as a journey of seeing, but as a journey of staying. When we feel a space with our bodies instead of merely confirming it with our eyes and slowly savor the changing expressions of that space over time, architecture becomes not a fleeting image but a sensation that remains in the body.

A single photograph can inspire someone to dream of travel or imagine a city they have never visited. For that reason, we cannot deny the experience of encountering architecture through images. Still, perhaps we also need, from time to time, to put down our phones and stay a little longer inside a space. 

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.