ABSTRACT
This chapter offers one mapping of the relationship between travel, space, and architecture using the specific example of the panorama, immense painted landscapes and
cityscapes installed in purpose-built rotundas which provided an immersive, 360-degree viewing experience of distant lands and remote occurrences. Particular attention is paid to the role the panorama played in reflecting and shaping perceptions of space
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The panorama’s detailed description of remote places and events fulfilled a
fundamental desire for a more comprehensive grasp of the complexities individuals experienced towards the end of the eighteen century, and it successfully satisfied an
increasing appetite for visual information spawned by an expansion of travel and the growth of cities. It was the intent of the panorama’s creator, Robert Barker (1739-1806),
to offer an illusion of a vast horizon that made objects and actors, near and far, comprehensible as à coup d’oeil.1 Panoramic depictions and their embrace made it necessary to move not only one’s eyes and head in order to grasp the whole, but also one’s body
in order to assimilate its vast, continuous canvas.2 As an image that provided sights uncommon or unobtainable in everyday life, the panorama has critical and significant
relationships to travel and architecture. Its inherent structural contradictions are what makes the panorama useful as an interpretive tool for rethinking the production of
spatial imaginations vis-à-vis travel and architecture. Travel involves both physical and imaginative displacements, experienced through an accumulation of singular and transitory moments which require a contemplative stillness to absorb and reflect upon.
Eighteenth-century Western architecture, on the other hand, involved clear physical
