“You must go here”: architecture, yelp and the tourist gaze
ISSN: 2631-6862
Article publication date: 7 June 2022
Issue publication date: 6 June 2023
Abstract
Purpose
The Tourist Gaze has been debated, reimagined and applied to a variety of actors and settings. This paper helps investigate how contemporary architecture operates as subject and participant in gazing practices.
Design/methodology/approach
Using Yelp reviews of art museums in a regional US city, a thematic analysis of text reviews and image uploads was conducted.
Findings
Reviewers do refer to buildings as objects of the gaze; but they also connect their experience of the building to emotions and to actions and use the building to orient themselves spatially. This article demonstrates that contemporary buildings are important components of tourist experiences as objects of the gaze, but also as frames for gazing and as stages for tourist practices.
Research limitations/implications
The research implications are both topical and methodological: the paper demonstrates that contemporary (neo-modern) architecture is a vibrant avenue of research, and that social networking sites are a promising potential source of data for studying architecture in the social field.
Originality/value
This research uses an underexplored data set, Yelp reviews, to capture what people pay attention to and think others will find interesting about architecture. It also adds important layers to studies on the tourist gaze. First, it emphasizes that architecture is important to tourists not only as an object of the gaze but also as a site for affective experience, action and daily life. Second, it addresses some building styles beyond the historical ones that are foundational to the idea of the tourist gaze.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work was funded in part by seed funding from the University of Tasmania's School of Architecture. Loren Dyer helped with data collection. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve the paper.
Citation
Lindsay, G. and Sawyer, M. (2023), "“You must go here”: architecture, yelp and the tourist gaze", Archnet-IJAR, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 267-286. https://doi.org/10.1108/ARCH-02-2022-0028
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited