“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”
–Anthony Bourdain
My general recipe for travel is as follows: I want to see cool architecture, I want to eat good food, and I want to get a local sense for the place. Meaning, I’d ideally like to hang out with locals and learn from them. What’s it really like, here?
Because of this, I’ve never been one to over schedule on trips. There will be things I absolutely want to see and do, but I always want to make sure that there’s time for the unknown.
I think you want to walk into places that you don’t have on your list, sit at the bar, and have a conversation with the person behind it. You will learn things, and maybe it’ll set you on a travel journey that you couldn’t have possibly planned back home.
That said, guides are still helpful for things like architecture and food. But I have never found general purpose guides — like the ones from Frommer’s — to be of any use. They have too much information that isn’t curated.
When I was in my early 20s, I used to use the Wallpaper* City Guides. They were small. I would mark them up as I went. And they gave me the list of must-see architecture. More recently, I’ve been relying on Monocle’s Travel Guides. They’re great too.
But I am now also a fan of Toronto-based ÅVONTUURA and the architecture guides that they produce. They are simple and beautiful pamphlets that give you a map of each city; a breakdown of contemporary, modern, and historic architecture; a recommended route through the city; and a full list of the important buildings, including their architects.
The founder of Avontuura, Karl van Es, was kind enough to send me their entire set, which as of this month includes new guides for Amsterdam, Berlin, Singapore, and Toronto. Thank you, Karl.
I’m now looking forward to trying one of these out on a future trip. I’m going to use it to decide what architecture I want to visit and, for the rest, I’ll just do what I normally like to do — wing it.
P.S. It took me multiple attempts of tossing these guides onto my kitchen counter in order to arrive at the above photo. I hope you like it.
Brandon’s first paragraph: a very good indicator that you received a top notch architectural education 😉! Perhaps more to the point, you were a conscientious and diligent student.
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Haha. What part specifically?
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“Hang out with locals and learn from them”; this is a great way to design stuff that is responsive, now and many years from now!
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Totally. You have to research and learn. That’s how every design process starts.
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As I am reading this I am in a bar in tokyo talking to strangers and learning about their city. I have always believed in verticle travel rather tha horizontal. In.other words dig in deep into a place and make relationships rather than plan to see much as you can and about how,much distace you travelled.. Life is about context and ineralionships in Time and space. Meaning. is more imortant than distance
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I like your approach! Enjoy Tokyo. It’s one of my favorite cities.
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