JOURNAL // a weblog: 10_0405

I’ve always enjoyed traveling. I think traveling to new [and often highly charted places] is the closest I’ll get to my childhood dreams of being an adventurer discovering lost lands, or my more recent dreams of being a swashbuckling pirate. There’s something about being in a place you’ve never been before that is thrilling outright. One sees the world through fresh eyes when they haven’t been there. I recall several occasions where visiting family would notice something about my hometown that I had failed to perceive. I think it’s the different point of view that makes it exciting and fresh.

I’ve circumnavigated the United States a couple times on my own now and I like the solitude of travel. When flying, it’s hard to travel with someone. Most people try to pass the time with magazines, books, iPods or iPhones, and other media. Any conversation must be done at just above the whisper, so as to not annoy one’s neighbors. It’s not until we’ve reached our designation that it’s good to have friends or family to share it with. Traveling on a plane is a lonesome business. Moving about town is another thing all together. But, as a designer, I travel for much different reasons than the average person. I travel for architecture. I travel for design. For local materials, inspiring ideas, lessons to be learned, precedents. A trip to Seattle, for example, is as much about visiting friends as it is to see the library by REM Koolhaas, the Space Needle, or the Experience Music Project by Frank Gehry. Granted, these ‘sights’ are typical of all tourists but I go to them for different reasons. Just like any building, there are lessons to be learned here, practices to be observed, form to be emulated, concepts to unravel in all these buildings. I want to go to them to see how the designers did what they did and try to unveil why. But, off the heavily trodden tourist path are other attractions: examples of alternative street edges, bio-swales, parks taking advantage of historical industrial architecture, parks designed by the first Landscape Architect, storm water management practices to be studied, and details to take not of. Traveling for a designer is an immense study session of the best kind: hands-on.

But there’s also the act of traveling that is therapeutic to me. I enjoy the adventure and excitement of going somewhere, even if it’s somewhere I’ve been. I love airports. The dichotomy of temporary and permanence creates an interesting dialogue to me. An airport is a very substantial and permanent thing. It is an entire city distilled down to its key elements and then represented to visitors through temporary media: food, glimpses of art and photography, knick knacks to ease the stress of travel. The building is permanent, but everything it contains seems temporary, brief, fleeting. Something in that I find oddly comforting. I also find that the act of travel is a great time for personal discovery, thought, and reflection, especially on the open road. There is little I love more than a clear and open road. The world’s stresses and worries seem to fade into the peripherals with the rest of the landscape and then it’s just me and the road.