The Modernist Travel Guide by Adam Štěch — The First Book Edited and Published By Sight Unseen — is Here to Take Your Travel Game to the Next Level

In this world, there are two types of travelers: those who prefer to relax, and those who prefer to explore. But within that second group, of which we are vehemently a part, there are those who will go to extreme lengths to acquire secret intel, especially in regards to one of our favorite subjects — peeping Modernist architecture around the world. They’ll scale a wall to catch a glimpse of an early Le Corbusier villa on Lake Geneva, build a whole trip around visiting a house museum outside Oslo, or risk getting caught by the police photographing an off-limits interior. The person we know who’s best at this type of recon is Adam Štěch, the architecture photographer behind the popular Instagram account @okolo_architecture, whose work we’ve followed for years and whose counsel we’ve often sought when traveling. Štěch has visited almost 50 countries on five continents to explore nearly 10,000 design landmarks, and today we’re launching a project together that’s been years in the making: the Modernist Travel Guide, photographed and written by Adam and edited and published by us. A pocket-sized reference book featuring nearly 400 of Adam’s favorite examples of modernist architecture in 30 major cities around the world, the guide is set to become an indispensable resource for any design lover’s travel.

The guide features architectural gems from the 1920s to the 1990s, in cities including San Francisco, Paris, Prague, Brussels, Tokyo, Sao Paolo, and Milan. Highlights include an amorphic, reinforced-concrete tower in Berlin, built to house Einstein’s research into relativity; a 1950s-era mural-lined apartment lobby in Rome; a Copenhagen church whose brick Expressionist façade mimics the shape of an organ; and a Walter Gropius–designed glass-brick London storefront. Plus famed and beloved design-world landmarks such as Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building in New York, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s Mexico City home and studio, and the Gio Ponti–designed Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm. The book’s design was created by Matěj Činčera and Jan Kloss, who co-founded the creative agency OKOLO with Štěch in 2009, and the book was finally brought to life this year with the patronage of the Swiss heritage furniture brand USM, whose third-generation owner’s home outside Zurich is included in the book. Take a scroll through some of our favorite examples from the book below, then head over to the Sight Unseen Shop to purchase a copy to take with you on your next trip.