Architecture Walk: Architecture Is A Way of Seeing
A Walkshop for the 2026 IA Conference
Architects learn to see before they learn to build. The training begins not with drafting but with sustained attention to the built environment, a disciplined noticing of how space, light, and sequence shape experience. Information architects, who structure meaning rather than matter, would benefit from the same education.
Philadelphia offers an unusually rich laboratory for this training. The city contains work by Louis Kahn, perhaps the most significant American architect of the twentieth century, as well as lesser-known projects by his former student Richard Saul Wurman, who would go on to coin the term “information architecture” in 1975. Throughout the walk, Dan Klyn will apply two analytical frameworks developed for information architecture education: BASIC (Boundaries, Associations, Situations, Invariants, Cycles) and OTC (Ontology, Topology, Choreography). Both frameworks translate readily between built and digital environments, making explicit the structural logic that architects in either domain must learn to perceive.
Stops will include the Barnes Foundation, where Albert Barnes arranged his collection according to visual relationships rather than chronological or national categories; the building where Kahn maintained his office while designing the Salk Institute and the Kimbell Art Museum; Philadelphia City Hall, the largest municipal building in the United States and the tallest masonry structure without a steel frame; and the former offices of Murphy Levy Wurman, the architectural partnership Wurman formed after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania.
The group will also descend into the subway to experience the 2nd Street Station, a Murphy Levy Wurman project that reflects the firm’s interest in wayfinding and environmental graphics. The walkshop concludes at Franklin Fountain in Old City.
Optional extensions visit the site of Murphy Levy Wurman’s earlier Quarry Street office and Penn’s Landing, a section of the Delaware waterfront whose layout the firm designed in the early 1970s.
Note: Registration for this event includes transportation to the Barnes Foundation prior to the beginning of the walk and a coffee break along the route.
