How Travel Shapes the Eye of a Young Architect

As a young designer, one of the most valuable investments you can make in your growth is not found only in textbooks or design studios. It is found in travel. Every city, every climate, and every culture tells its own story through buildings, materials, and the ways people move through them. Stepping outside of your familiar environment exposes you to design lessons that simply cannot be learned in the classroom or behind a computer screen.

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I experienced this firsthand. The city is full of contrasts. Modern glass towers sit alongside mid-century icons, Spanish Colonial revival homes share blocks with sleek stucco apartment complexes, and adaptive reuse projects give industrial warehouses new life. Experiencing these structures in person sharpened my awareness of how environment, transportation, and culture shape architecture.

But Los Angeles also revealed something deeper: the inseparability of design from the lived realities of the people who inhabit it. To truly understand a city, it is not enough to admire its buildings. You must try to see through the eyes of those who live there, how they move, how they use space, and what challenges shape their daily lives.

Context: Climate, Culture, and Place

Los Angeles, unlike Chicago where I study and work, is defined by its Mediterranean climate of sun, warmth, and earthquakes. You notice immediately how construction reflects those conditions. Lightweight framing and stucco finishes dominate residential neighborhoods. Flat roofs are common, not only as stylistic choices but because they work in a region where snow loads are not a concern.

Culturally, Los Angeles celebrates indoor-outdoor living. Open floor plans spill seamlessly into patios and courtyards, blurring the line between house and landscape. This highlighted for me how architecture can be an extension of lifestyle. It is not only about shelter, but about designing spaces that respond to how people want to live in their environment.

Transportation and Circulation

Travel also teaches you how cities move. Los Angeles is shaped as much by freeways as it is by architecture. The vast network of highways influences where neighborhoods thrive, how density is distributed, and how public spaces are used. Experiencing the city’s car culture firsthand reminded me that buildings do not exist in isolation. They are always connected to larger systems of circulation.

In contrast, Chicago’s elevated trains and walkable grid create a very different rhythm of movement. In Chicago, density is concentrated around transit stops, and streetscapes are designed to be pedestrian friendly, encouraging street life. In Los Angeles, wide boulevards, parking podiums, and car oriented planning dominate, which fundamentally changes how people experience buildings and public space.

As a designer, observing these differences matters. Circulation is not only about cars, trains, or sidewalks. It is about how people flow through their daily lives. A plaza in a walkable city will be used differently than one in a car dominant city.

Beyond the Buildings

What struck me most in Los Angeles, however, extended far beyond architecture and infrastructure. The scale of the city’s homelessness crisis was impossible to overlook. From Santa Monica to Little Tokyo to Hollywood, not only in the area historically labeled Skid Row, encampments lined sidewalks, freeway underpasses, and commercial corridors. Entire stretches of the city were marked by insecurity, vacant or abandoned buildings, and streets filled with litter and neglect.

For me, this revealed how profoundly the built environment is tied to broader social and economic crisis. Architecture may shape form and function, but it also exists in the midst of human struggles. A sidewalk is not only a path of circulation; for some, it becomes a place of shelter. A vacant building is not just underutilized space; it represents missed potential for housing or community infrastructure.

As designers, this forces us to confront an essential truth. Thriving urban environments cannot be measured solely by their architecture. They must also be judged by how well they support human dignity, stability, and opportunity.

Why Travel Matters for Designers

Traveling allows us to compare and contrast these lessons with the design realities of our home cities. In Chicago, heavy masonry, deep foundations, and high performance façades dominate because of cold winters, snow loads, and strong winds off Lake Michigan. The contrast with Los Angeles’ lightweight, sun-soaked architecture and its auto centric infrastructure made me reflect on how materials, forms, and circulation systems are never universal. They are shaped by context, by climate, by culture, by transportation, and by history.

But equally, travel underscores the importance of empathy. Understanding a city is not just about sketching its buildings or admiring its landmarks. It requires asking: How do people actually live here? What systems support them, and what systems fail them?

For young architects and designers, these observations become part of your design toolkit. You learn that what works in one city may fail in another, and that great design always starts with understanding place, both its physical conditions and its human realities.

The Call to Travel

As designers, we are responsible for creating environments that inspire, protect, and connect people. To do that well, we need to broaden our perspective. Travel is not a luxury. It is a form of education. Each trip equips you with fresh ideas, cultural awareness, and a deeper appreciation for the diversity of architecture around the world.

Whether you are exploring Los Angeles, wandering through European historic districts, or simply visiting a neighboring city, approach each journey with a designer’s eye and with empathy. Notice how climate, culture, construction, and circulation intersect. But also ask: How do people here experience their city? What challenges do they face, and what opportunities are being missed?

For me, Los Angeles reinforced the idea that architecture is inseparable from its environment and its systems of movement, but also from the human lives lived in and around it. That lesson will stay with me long after the trip, and it is one reason I encourage every young architect to get out there, travel, and see the world not only through the lens of design, but through the experiences of the people who call each place home.