Jacks - The Architect's Tour

If you want to be a good designer, set aside the glossy magazines, turn off your computer, and seek out first-hand encounters with good design. When it comes to cities, buildings, and art, actual experience is almost always better than the virtual kind. No image can replicate Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp when the light is just right, or capture the silent speech one hears on a stroll through Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, or explain hours dissolving in Peter Zumthor’s baths at Vals. That is the reason for this book: to encourage you to actively pursue direct aesthetic experience in the built environment, and to reflect upon the best reasons and ways to be a dedicated design traveler.

Traveling to learn is an integral part of the education of student architects and designers. It is vital for designers to know how to be effective design travelers, to know how to seek out and encounter places, buildings, and objects, and to develop a capacity for looking, drawing, and, above all, discerning. But to be a student is only to be “one who is studying,” which means all of us who, if we are truly alive, delight in the application of the mind to the acquisition of knowledge.

Reviews:

Pointed, focused, and meditative, this book exemplifies the traveling architect realizing built form.

John R. Stilgoe, Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape, Harvard University

The message of The Architect’s Tour is an important one: whether conceived in the abstract realm of paper or a computer screen, architecture’s ultimate sphere of power is and always has been in the real world. The laboratory and classroom of the student architect is ‘out there’: and it is stocked with wonderful places to visit and awe-inspiring buildings to study. Ben Jacks insists you go out into the world and look…because he knows you will become a better and better architect by filling your imagination with memories of great architecture! He also helps…by providing handy pointers to planning your own architectural tours. 

Simon Unwin, author of Analysing Architecture