Immobile Travels
How to teach travel in a time of global immobility? That question was on my mind during the last months of 2020. I was teaching my courses all bundled up, and in complete isolation, from my unheated summer house; most of the time, the physical whereabouts of the students that I faced every day on screen was unbeknown to me. After months of confinement in the city, like many others in Turkey, I had fled to the coast, to my tiny cottage on the Aegean, for the freedom and tranquility the nearby forest and walks by the coast promised.
In recent years, I had been teaching a course, The Architect’s Journey, with my colleague, Haluk Zelef. We had wanted to re-think this formative practice of architectural education with architecture and architectural history graduate students. Lately, the literature on travel had burgeoned, disclosing the entanglement of architecture with a multitude of mobilities in the modern era, from camera and transportation technologies and infrastructures to tourism and migration. To familiarize students with these different tracks of research on architecture and mobility had been also part of our objectives.
Figure 1. Photograph of Phellos taken by students in Lycia as part of The Architect’s Journey course in 2017.
The course was structured around three parts. In the first section, students read and discussed theoretical and historical texts to develop critical positions on travel and tourism, particularly on exclusive forms of travel aimed at emulating the object lessons of culturally prized sites and masters, as in the case of the Grand Tour. For this purpose, the concept of travel pedagogy, suggested by Kay Bea Jones in The Discipline of Architecture, was quite helpful. Jones argues for “experientially centered studies dependent on some cultural and geographic shift that radically alter sense perception and challenge visual and spatial cognition.” As she states, the sharpening of the senses that comes with cultural and geographic displacement might be used by the traveler to cultivate self-constructed knowledge about the sites visited, which thus can be seen as “habitable places with variable interpretations belonging to the onlooker” rather than iconic sites with solidified meanings. The self-reflexive internalization of the experience can open formerly neglected readings of places, such as gendered and queered ones.
Figure 2. Photographs by students in Lycia for The Architect’s Journey course in 2017.
Equipped with such conceptual and critical tools, in the second phase, the students embarked on a collective journey to a historically significant region. The cultural and natural landscapes they explored included the Lycian coast by the Mediterranean, and the Phrygian valley and Gordion, alongside the Phrygian tumuli in Ankara (Figures 1, 2, and 3). In the end, we expected them to produce critical and creative projects based on their personal experiences of the area. In the last phase of the course, traveler-architects and traveler-historians worked on their site-specific projects at the METU Archaeological Museum for a collective exhibition (Figure 4).
How could that format be used in a course under global pandemic conditions of confinement, isolation, and frustration? In any case, a sustained criticism of human mobility was necessary to address our encroachment on the natural habitats of other species that many believe had brought on the pandemic in the first place, alongside the carbon footprint caused by travel and tourism. Living with the consequences lent urgency to developing an eco-criticism of travel. The global ecological imbalance seemed to signal a threshold necessitating new ways of inhabitation and mobility. What might be those alternative ways of moving and travel?
Figure 3. A collage of photographs taken by students in Phrygia for The Architect’s Journey course in 2019.
As a matter of fact, architects are used to imaginary “trips taken on paper” without moving. As elaborated by José Manuel Pozo and José Ángel Medina in Architects' Journeys: Building, Travelling, Thinking, architects not only take paper with them on their trips for their drawings, but also have the skills to visualize architectures via different media without seeing, or even before the latter are built. In the course, we had been complicating architectural design as an inspirational process by taking issue with a causal relationship between what the architect sees on her journey and the ensuing architectural work. Taking our cue from Mark Wigley’s contention, in the same volume, that for architects, the actual journey is often a retroactive confirmation of what had already been developed before departing, we had come up with the concept of “pre-posterous travel,” meaning a journey without actual departure (preposterous comes from the Latin prae-posterus, meaning reversed).[1] Now, we were ready to embark upon our “pre-posterous,” imaginary, or virtual travels.
In the first part of the revised course, students read about, and discussed travel, mobility, and architecture, as before. Yet this time we added to their reading list environmental humanities texts and texts on our current predicament that questioned the global ecological and political crises. With the consciousness that the students developed about ecological and political justice, we asked them to develop their specific projects for imaginary journeys.
Figure 4. Photographs of The Architect’s Journey: Phrygia exhibition taken by students at METU Archaeological Museum in 2019.
The rest of the course was reserved for the development of individual projects through critiques, and the construction of online displays. For the majority of the students, the starting point was personal. One student imagined the travels of three nineteenth-century women, one Armenian, one Georgian, and one French, in the Caucasus, her immigrant family’s ancestral lands. Another traced the daily itineraries and surroundings of her grandfather, who owned a candy store in Ankara’s historic center in the early twentieth century, and resided there with his family. A student who was planning to visit a friend in Australia explored her destination before departure, looking beyond the usual tourist itineraries. Yet another student’s daily peregrinations in her neighborhood during quarantine coincided with the mucilage problem in the Marmara Sea, and resulted in an ecologically sensitive photo journal. Some students preferred to follow more established formats. Among those projects were an exploration of Louis Kahn’s architecture and journeys, and a stroll in Diyarbakır (the student’s hometown) with the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi. In addition to historical research through primary and secondary sources, these students developed less orthodox research strategies, including interviewing relatives and mining family albums and collections. Yet other students did short field trips, took photographs, found footage. Eventually, all designed specific virtual exhibits for our collective exhibition, Architect's Journey: (Im)mobile Travels in 2021.
“Architects are used to imaginary “trips taken on paper” without moving.”
Interestingly, despite the lack of actual travel, the final projects generated substantial self-constructed knowledge, in Kay Bea Jones’ terms—a result that we did not dare to imagine in the beginning. Compared to the original version of the course that had focused on a specific region, this time, student works became more interpretative and, in some cases, critical. In terms of our intentions, that was a most welcome outcome. The freedom that students had in choosing their “destinations,” which led to the personal starting points of many, might have contributed to this. Subjectively framed and developed projects rendered the (self-)constructed nature of the displayed information conspicuous. The trade-off was the somewhat disjointed look of the exhibition, which worked as an ensemble highlighting multifarious aspects of a single site in the past.
But the constraints of our global predicament, which seemed like a crisis, had led students to focus on the potentialities of architecture as a representational and visionary medium, and imparted a certain genuineness to their critique of travel. So much so that they became self-conscious about the environmental impact of the digital technologies they were engaged with in their projects. A condition, alas, they could not escape under current circumstances of immobility.
Author’s note: I would like to thank the research assistants for this course over the years, Elif Bilge, Aylin Atacan, and, finally, Gizem Güner, who also built our online exhibition platform.
Citation
Belgin Turan Özkaya, “Immobile Travels,” PLATFORM, May 8, 2023.
Notes
[1] For a slightly different and very productive usage of the term, see Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Davide Deriu, Edoardo Piccoli, and Belgin Turan Özkaya, “Travels in Architectural History,” Architectural Histories 4 n. 1 (2016): 1-7.
