Heuristic practices. Snapshots from Polytechnic Travels

This essay explores travel as a heuristic practice within the polytechnic tradition of architectural education, asking at what point travel turns the traveller into a proactive, critical thinker. Drawing on Freire's notion of critical consciousness, it traces a genealogy of institutionalised educational journeys at the Milan Higher Technical Institute (later Politecnico di Milano) from the late nineteenth century onwards, where travel developed in parallel with Italy's own transformation into a country "caught in action." Three historical episodes articulate this trajectory: Gaetano Moretti's journey to Greece and Egypt (1903), where modernising landscapes mirrored Italy's transition; the 1926 collective excursion to Naples and Pompeii, which — mediated by Vers une architecture — catalysed the emergence of the Milan School; and the 1995 journey-cum-exhibition along the Volga, where post-Soviet urban change reinvigorated architecture's epistemic engagement with transition. Against this backdrop, the authors reread their own Grand Tour through the Baltics (2024) as a form of "speculative juxtaposition," connecting apparently unrelated architectures — from Riga's Great Guildhall to Albini's Treasury Museum, from the Dailes Theatre to the Milan Triennale. The essay argues that travel, approached as a situated and speculative practice, remains an open pedagogical field in which architectural learning shifts from categorisation to interpretation, and from historical acknowledgement to critical application.