Erin Besler / Besler & Sons, Field Trip, field guide, 2026. Photographs by Loretta Koch courtesy of Besler & Sons.
Architectural travel has had a way of determining what becomes worthy of recording, seeing, and referencing. It’s paid attention to icons and monuments. From surveys to site visits, from the Grand Tour and its catalog of historic sites 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 looks to ordinary acts of adaptation and exchange as evidence of how the built environment is actually produced, and in doing so expands what counts as design, what is referenced, and where expertise is located.
Project Team
Erin Besler, Ian Besler, Loretta Koch, Ana Rico Rubio, Lucia Tian, Nneoma Onyekwere, Yicong Chandler Shan
Fabrication
Nick Rodrigues / Cart Life
Field Trip is produced in part with support from Princeton University SoA. The program is 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.
Erin Besler is cofounder of Besler & Sons, and faculty at Princeton University School of Architecture.