Fanatically wielding a camera, recording how all sorts of cultures arrive at improbable spatial solutions for everyday problems. Eye to eye at last with Japanese masterpieces known only from books until then. A long time ago Carel Weeber ensured that Delft architecture students could receive funding for study tours. After all, students of aerospace engineering had a wind tunnel, chemistry students had a lab, physics students had an atomic reactor, and architecture students had a planet full of buildings, precedents whose full value cannot be appreciated by consulting specialist literature alone. All of these are solid arguments. I, too, travelled a lot and learned a lot along the way.

In addition to just looking, many people will, like me, have taken part in workshops, research projects or design studios in exotic locations, preferably unknown and spectacular ones — the hyper-urbanity of Tokyo, the historically sliced Berlin, the desolation and shrinkage of Detroit, the crumbling prefab housing blocks (plattenbau) of Tbilisi, or the sectarian and fragmented Beirut. I, too, looked in amazement and my jaw often dropped in sheer astonishment. But another feeling has crept over me in the past year, a sense that I’m part of what I’d like to call intellectual disaster tourism. I now feel slightly uncomfortable visiting such places. It’s as though I’m enjoying some perverse pleasure. Not that I end up howling with laughter. It’s more the knowledge that this malicious pleasure takes the form of a mental stimulation of the senses. The brain is confronted by something implausible and must abandon its habitual routines to make any sense of it. You must exit your mental comfort zone because you don’t possess the right implements in your intellectual toolbox to take on this reality. And the intellect enjoys it, since such challenges are a tonic. After all, a situation not understood requires interpretation, explanation, conceptualisation. But this intellectual diversion is at the expense of the place visited, its people and the lives they lead. For ultimately you are not really concerned about what you see. It doesn’t affect your life. It remains at a comfortable distance. And therein lies a measure of Schadenfreude.

Anyway, disaster tourism and malicious joy are both deeply human and have always existed — and so too is feeling uncomfortable about it. But what bugs me in particular are the pretexts for being there. As stated, the visit may be a 'professional' one, not a holiday but a workshop or a design studio, and the location can serve as a starting point for generating new ideas. The pretexts consist, at best, of modestly good intentions and, at worst, of a session of megalomaniac problem-solving, based on the idea of coming up with the ultimate solutions for the place you’ve just been parachuted into. In what is a perverse reversal of roles, the affluent west receives intellectual development aid; the second and third worlds supply the apparently over-developed, trouble-free Europe with challenging cases for education and research. Young academics are scarcely aroused or stirred by problems within the borders of their own country any more. They’ve got to be more spectacular, more exotic, more extreme. Even though the ‘otherness’ of these places offers challenges for many designers (students and others), there is no commitment. Most of the design studios do not enter into any sustained relation with the place visited; nor do they form structural working relationships with local authorities, property developers, or cultural and educational institutions. Not that they don’t want to but, rather, because of the unbelievable amount of time and energy you need to invest in such ventures to make them productive. That those parties aren’t around the corner but operate in a different cultural, social and economic context makes it all the more complex. This is a level of commitment that goes far beyond the time span of many workshops, research projects and/or design studios. Efforts of this kind require years of commitment.

Perhaps it’s all a bit less spectacular in the Netherlands, but the big advantage is that commitment here really can, by contrast, be more productive. What’s more, it’s easier to enter into enduring relations with other parties, and the socio-economic context is familiar. Op top of that, there are enough interesting issues that could benefit from a healthy dose of commitment on the basis of a design or research studio. For example, subjects like the shrinking towns of Zeeland and Limburg, or social housing, no longer a serious theme even though housing associations succeed less and less in building interesting homes for the lower strata of society. So there are plenty of intellectual challenges to enable designers to leave their comfort zone and examine the limits of their discipline.
The master studios at Delft should be much more active in seeking collaborative ventures with social partners. After all, a university is not only a place of education but also a research institute that has a responsibility to make future generations of designers open to the society around them and its spatial problems. No wonder a revolution took place in the faculty of architecture in the 1960s, given the gap that existed between what was happening inside and outside the walls of the faculty. Inside, the assignment was to design a small house in the hills for a retired sea captain, while outside, fifteen-story blocks of gallery-access flats were springing up all around Delft South.

The air is no longer pregnant with revolution today. Quite the contrary: we are lulled into sleep in our apparently problem-free paradise and seek adventure elsewhere.