One of the first things you learn as an architecture student is the importance of the field trip. The journey to get to know the work of the great masters, to apprehend architecture, to feel the space, the dimensions, the implementation, in essence, the architectural reality.

Famous are the journeys that many renowned architects made as a method of learning and inspiration. The journeys of Barragan (1902-1988), Richard Neutra (1892-1970) and even Le Corbusier (1887-1965).

Throughout history, the methods of learning a discipline such as Architecture have varied widely, especially with the incursion of new technologies into our lives. COVID-19 pandemic caused the biggest challenge in education around the world, which was seen as an opportunity to introduce digital teaching and learning. Social distancing, ban on group meetings and restrictive movement policies shaped the new teaching methodologies that came to stay. Nowadays we can build an idea about the built space analysing plans, studying pictures, or watching short films about the building but the real experience is a must. Measuring with our eyes, comparing with the size of different parts of our body, living the spatial feeling is irreplaceable. It is possible that the physical experience could be substituted using virtual reality for an immersion in the analysed space, however, this option is not yet within the possibilities of Spanish public universities, with an average of 50 students per group.

This publication claims the return to the field trip as a learning method in the Architecture II workshop course taught in the last semester of the final year of the bachelors’ Degree in Interior Architecture at the School of Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica de València with the aim of immersing the students in the space that will be the object of their design project to be developed during the course.

Throughout the short visit that this activity occupies, the students will have to learn to look, that is, to reflect on the sensations that the environment provokes in us, the emotions it arouses, the possibilities and quality of the spaces, all under the attentive supervision and complicity of the teaching staff, who will guide them in the process of learning what to look at and how to look.

Before the visit, the project of the house, designed in the 1950s for a family of the Catalan bourgeoisie, is studied in the classroom. Being a reference work of modern Spanish architecture, the sketches, drawings, plans, technical specifications and photographs published in academic papers are analysed.

During the guided tour, students take notes and photographs, make drawings and ask questions about what they do not understand or what catches their attention, always keeping in mind the project that they are going to develop. In some cases, after feeling the space, the area in which it is built, its relationship with the outdoor space, the shadows and visuals, the forest, the beach and the sea changed the student’s original idea about their project, proposing different uses for the apprehended built space.

After the trip and the exposure to the space and the materiality of the building, the professors present their own photographs and sketches of the building, underlining those aspects that should have attracted their attention regarding the structural typology, the use of materials, the connections, problems, and pathologies that their project should solve or improve.

Keywords: Architecture Studies, field trip, Architects’ Journeys.