Preface [chapter]

2016 Travel, Space, Architecture  
3 in the Toronto session. 2 Seven years in the making, this book consists of papers by some of the participants in the Toronto session, as well as several newly commissioned chapters and four interviews with architects who practice internationally. It brings together scholars of architecture, design and urban studies who have embarked on various transdisciplinary explorations, along with practitioners of architecture who find the subject of travel central to their work and itinerant paths. The
more » ... uthors of the chapters in this volume ask the following questions: What (pre)conceptions shape the identities of architects, urbanists, and non-professional spaceconstituents and their approaches to places as they travel from one cultural context to the other? What ideas travel with them and become transplanted at the new places of inhabitation? What spatial elements or vocabularies do they choose to bring back home, and how do they interact with their new environments? How do visions of space through new travel apparatuses reshape broader spatial imaginations and practices? What happens in cases of lost homes, multiple attachments, or when 'networks' shaped by processes of mobility and distant communication replace 'communities'? It is obvious that traveling operates not only as a real and important phenomenon in the world but also as a subject and even a theoretical tool of emerging scholarly discourses. With this volume we wish to demonstrate that the lens of travel can move architecture theory and practice beyond the centrality of static, place-bound principles into an under- standing of more open-ended networks of relationships (of subjects and sites), as well as bring architecture scholarship to a more productive and engaging dialogue with other academic and professional fields, particularly those that began outlining a discursive, transdisciplinary space in relation to travel and beyond. 2 The original group of scholars who gathered in Toronto for the session included
doi:10.4324/9781315549712-2 fatcat:7iudt7pog5bv7hliraq5f2rwqe