ABSTRACT
We are two English university lecturers in architecture. We have re-worked and reshaped, with some emphasis on tactility, the images and impressions that we brought back from two study trips with our students to the city of Ahmedabad in India in 2006. During these trips, we reflected upon how influenced western architecture has been by the images, ideas and artefacts brought home from travels by key figures such as Jones, Soane, Ruskin and especially (since we were in Ahmedabad), Le Corbusier. Then we asked: what is it to be western architectural tourists in a foreign city now, in our world of cheap air travel, instantaneous media technology and global finance? How might the images that we bring home critique the modernist and postmodernist architectural tourists' gaze with respect to a more contemporary postcolonial sense of otherness and in this case a city of extreme differences?
