Category Archives: Field Research

Field research is often the beginning of a body of work in the making.

AmericaLand

One Way or AnotherWelcome to Americaland! Where everything is Made Better®. This fall I went to New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut to see for myself what was happening at Ground Zero of the American Financial Crisis. This failure of a system that we have seen sweep across the globe has had an interesting impact that literally caught some developers so off guard, that what we find are some examples that range from Edward Scissorhands-like of Mansions, with overgrown unkempt landscaping to apocalyptic (The Happening) sort of frozen construction sites. The photos you see of the build sites are all taken during work days and I was amazed to see either little activity or yellow tape and plastic sheeting to close up the jobs, unfinished.
Americaland, it’s like your town only Made Better®!

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El Chorrillo 2.0

Last Spring I was able to revisit the community of El Chorrillo to re-photograph the resident built structures that were the source of my 2006 research in conjunction with the Penn State Architecture department. The photographs below are all represented in my earlier research, some with moderate changes and some with remarkable changes. These images directly challenge the assumptions made about this poor community in Panama City, Panama. The assumption is that the members of this community are violent and don’t care about their community. Yet most of these homes are designed or altered with such care that it would seem that one would think that the existence of these structures alone would suggest otherwise. This collection is meant to accompany the previous work, supporting the fact that the community members of El Chorrillo hope for a safer place for future generations.

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Casco Viejo – Home away from home for the next 10 days.

If you notice the bottom left quadrant in the image, you’ll see a trapezoid shape in the water with Mangroves growing into the water. Directly above that trapezoid and one block to the right is where we’ll be staying. Hospedaje Casco Viejo is the hostel where we stayed last time and it’s such an easy going and relatively nice place that I decided to go again. I’m not looking forward to a week of cold showers again, but sometimes you just gotta bite your lip and take it.

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Over Looked: Research in Panama

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