Walking To Know

About the Book

This book represents a transformational experience presented in the form of a broad meditation upon a walking pilgrimage by an experienced designer on the Camino de Santiago. Tinted with a scholarly lens and a travelogue commentary on places and events during the journey, the work pursues a wider awareness of design purpose and perception based on immediate and past experience. The use of the word “pilgrimage” denotes the nature of the journey beyond mere physical effort and near an extraordinary spiritual and mental enterprise. The emphasis is on walking either physically or fi guratively as a means to the achievement of design knowledge that more fully informs, awakens, and utilizes the body and the senses to produce a superior design articulation.

The journey took ten years in preparation with only three months in execution; however, it was not a search for “enlightenment” as much as it was led by a sincere desire to know and to see. To know fi rst hand the places and the people as well as to see the land up close in a manner of receiving a legacy of centuries of presence, culture, and testimony. Truly, to partake of the experience of thousands of other “pilgrims” across 10 centuries and understand their journeys not so much as just a walk of faith but also an enduring legacy that has had critical impact upon design practice. In this manner the design activity is seen more properly understood as a pilgrimage rather than an occupation or a classifi ed profession..

For organizational purposes the book consists of two major sections that complement one another and serve to clarify and amplify both text and testimony. Section One addresses issues of design interest in a holistic rather than a technical manner while Section Two presents a narrative of the experience that serves to place the journey in focus. The symbiotic engagement between the two sections results in a richer narrative of causality that affi rms purpose and consequence of journey. Many conclusions are left to the reader and no strict delimitation is made of discussion boundaries except for the centrality of truth and the guiding power of passion. Without a doubt, this book is about open and truthful personal quests and does not conform to overriding socio-political frameworks of dialogue. Insight is extracted from the author’s experience and scholarship across 40 plus years that results in an animated and challenging dialogue along with a vast and diverse bibliography with works of varied provenance that served to emphasize and support salient and outstanding concepts and ideas with bearing on the quest. The intention was not to produce a treatise or a guidebook but rather to express an experience and its consequences upon a person, a mind, and a spirit with benefi t to design.

About the Author

Germán T. Cruz is a landscape architect by profession and vocation with a wide path of practical engagement in urban and residential design across the USA and several countries. In addition to professional practice from his studio, Professor Cruz teaches at the Department of Landscape Architecture in the College of Architecture and Planning at Ball State University where he leads graduate and undergraduate design studios on urban design, graphic communications, parks, regional design, and open space as well as lecturing on design theory, technology and materials, contemporary history of urban design, and philosophy of landscape architecture. In 2010 he walked on the Road of Saint James through southern France and northern Spain from Le Puy en Velay to Santiago over 3000 km in 66 days. The result of this journey was a design meditation and travelogue under the title Walking to Know that was published recently by Xlibris. A collection of his poems has also been published in a bilingual edition (Spanish/English) under the title Poemas Veniales/Venial Poems.