Ryan Hillier

Thesis Synopsis

Nycto-philia - to be fond of, or take comfort in, the presence of darkness & the occupation of shadows.

Transecting the American isthmus via the Panama Canal has necessitated classes of accommodation that are directly servile to the programme of the construction, maintenance and continued use of the infrastructural waterway. The Panamanian denizens hold a contingent relationship with this framework; their living standards exploited at the whims of the canal and the global economy it serves.

Derived from a reinterpreted choreography of the prevailing urban fabric, the scheme extrapolates existing communities peripheral to the container yards that supply the canal into a civic realm that engages with social concerns for living standards, establishing a series of dwellings, civic halls and communal loci set into a rich ecological & topological context. Challenging social ignorance of contemporary commerce, the scheme facilitates the fundamentals of contemporary living while establishing its own framework of communal provisions and amenities shared between communities, driving social cohesion in a fragmented context overshadowed by its infrastructural conception.

Generated as a family of screened shelters, spatial configurations are arranged within the shadows of the architectural enclosures and dispersed across the marshland site as a folded tapestry of a landscape.  At a subterranean level, the scheme also introduces a network of ecological retention systems that stabilise prevailing climatic conditions while also utilising the canal as a hydrological energy source to generate power while delivering water supplies across the community.