Erin Besler / Besler & Sons, Field Trip, postcards, 2026. Courtesy of Erin Besler.
From surveys to site visits, from the Grand Tour and its catalog of monuments to excursions into the field, travel and its documentation are means of seeing and forms of architectural work. Field Trip redirects these architectural practices through an itinerary that shifts attention to the ordinary and charming ways through which the built environment takes shape: things patched, adjusted, added to, left behind, and made to work. To repairs made with what's at hand. To revisions that accumulate over time. To the confrontation between regulatory systems and material. And to expertise as it moves between people and things. These are small architectural events evidently made by many.
A kiosk at the Materials & Applications Storefront Project Space is Field Trip’s point of departure and return. It’s a field station and traveling companion that gathers maps, postcards, and provisions for going out into the city. The project extends outward through a series of routes through Echo Park, asking visitors to go on a field trip, contribute an observation, or suggest somewhere else to stop.
Field Trip approaches architecture as something continually produced through observation, use, maintenance, adaptation, and exchange while expanding architecture’s references through these distributed encounters.
Project Team
Erin Besler, Ian Besler, Loretta Koch, Ana Rico Rubio, Lucia Tian, Nneoma Onyekwere
Fabrication
Nick Rodrigues / Cart Life
Based on the book A companion to architecture and its messy relationship with building materials, signage systems, communication equipment, plant life, and people by Erin Besler and Ian Besler
Bio TK