As the School of Architecture approaches Travel Week, Rudolph Hall empties out. Students, faculty, and studios disperse into cities, landscapes, and communities across the globe. For a brief moment, the school dissolves its walls and reconstitutes itself elsewhere, carried by encounters with architecture in situ.

This issue is not only a collection of travel diaries. It seeks to go beyond the story of how it was. Travel Week is not just about where we went or what we saw, but about what travel does to us, what it reveals, and what it conceals. How do students interpret the places they visit, and how are their perspectives reshaped? What do the people they meet have to say about our presence? Why do faculty choose these destinations—what pedagogical, political, or historical stakes underlie those choices?
At the same time, this issue will look to the places we do not visit, or cannot visit. We want to invite voices from those locations—voices that remain unacknowledged by our itineraries, or excluded by the politics of borders, cost, or conflict. Equally, we want to hear from those who cannot travel at all: what does it mean to learn architecture from a distance, to study without the possibility of mobility?

Through interviews with faculty, reflections from students, and contributions from outside our traveling body, the issue will trace how these journeys and absences shape our collective imagination. It will capture travel as pedagogy, as cultural encounter, and as limitation—emphasizing not only the geo-diversity of architectural study, but also the diversity of perspectives that extend beyond the act of travel itself. Forget the Lonely Planet or the Michelin Guide—this is an atlas of presence and absence, composed of the many voices that make up and surround the school.

Eli, Rizek and Tomas