From Brooklyn to Pedasi
Two New York architects find themselves left to their own devices in the Panamanian backcountry with a ragtag crew of surfers and fishermen. Our first project in Panama wasn’t just a change of scenery, but an overhaul of how we worked and how we lived.
author
KRISTIN MORALES, LEED BD+C
FOUNDER / PRINCIPAL DESIGNER
IVAN MORALES
FOUNDER / PRINCIPAL DESIGNER
In 2007, Ivan and I were living in ‘up and coming’ Bushwick, Brooklyn, enjoying our designer lifestyle while living on the fringes of habitable New York City. We finally had the loft we had always dreamed of - even if it was essentially at the end of the L line - as our friends often referred to ‘no man's land’. We both had positions at well established, internationally recognized architectural firms. We worked long hours but this was not uncommon amongst our peers. We were solidly in the grind. Still, we spent our downtime socializing, going to concerts at all of the city’s best venues, exploring neighborhoods, museums, and forgotten un-sung gems.
In the Wyckoff loft we finally had space at home to work on our own projects: architectural design competitions, painting, drawing, and photographic collages. It was really the first time since art school that we had the space to create on our own time. It was freeing and invigorating. We worked independently and together. We were living our best NYC life at that moment. In retrospect it was such a privilege to have the life we had in New York City.
Since as far back as I could remember, I never wanted to stay in one place too long. I had no interest in being a ‘company’ employee - a person that parked themselves at the same desk until retirement. I wanted to find out what each type of architectural practice was like, how it was structured, how the projects ran, what the office culture was like. A decade into my practice, I had already tried residential, development, commercial, and institutional firms. The longest I stayed in any one place was four years. By 2007 I had landed at FXFowle, where I was happy to be part of a large team of very experienced, highly respected architects. Yet just shy of a year in, I was already feeling restless - trying to decide what my next move would be.
In contrast, this is just about the only time I can recall Ivan having more patience that I did. He spent nearly 9 years at PBDW. During his tenure there, he was working on some of the most innovative design projects in New York City at that time - and also some of the most uninteresting, as is often the case with any job - but he stuck with it. Nearly a decade in, Ivan decided he wanted to try something new, and began working at Selldorf Architects. He was excited about this opportunity to work on such varied projects at another prestigious and respected firm. He would talk excitedly about details of the projects when he came home, in a way that he hadn’t in years. He was enjoying a renewed focus on design and it was a welcome change for him.
Shortly after starting at Selldorf Ivan was assigned as the project architect for the AMA Estancia residential project in Panama.
The remote location and desire to be locally contextual had required a lot of back and forth with the client and several trips to the site in Panama. During a client meeting, in a desire to speed up the processes between NYC and Panama, the client had asked Ivan directly if he would move to Panama for a few months to oversee the project. Ivan had already been to the site twice, spoke Spanish fluently, and got along with the client - so it made sense from the client-side - but this was a significant overstep of the management structure at the firm. Caught off guard, Ivan quickly said no and made a joke about how he grew up in Mexico and spent his whole life trying to escape the developing world, he wasn’t about to go back!
“You said no?!” I exclaimed that evening, “why?!
While Ivan grew up in Mexico, I grew up in Long Island, and consequently had always dreamed of being somewhere else. Living outside of the U.S. was a long-held ambition of mine. In fact, before moving to NYC, I had enrolled in the Peace Corps, but didn’t end up joining because they had just eliminated their design-build program and instead slated me had slated me to a project unrelated to my field in West Africa. I thought the departure from my skill set would be too detrimental to entering into the competitive world of architecture afterwards. At that point, we had been living in New York City for 10 years. We were in our mid-30’s, adventurous and ambitious - I reminded Ivan that night, telling him I could take a sabbatical for a few months. I imagined myself running on the beach before work each morning, learning Spanish, working on my photography. NYC would always be here when we got back.
Ivan relented.
2 months later, we flew from JFK to Panama City for the first time together. Everywhere I looked in Panama City, cranes lingered over half-finished skyscrapers. It felt like a shadow of a major city. The stand-still traffic and frustrated drivers reminded me of the nightmare traffic of Mexico City. That changed quickly. We met the client for breakfast and drove to the regional airport, where a friend of the client stood in front of a clunky plane from the 1940’s. He was not wearing any pilot garb, and the plane didn’t look like something actually capable of flight. This was going to be interesting.
As we lifted up over the Panama Canal, I finally felt the rush of adventure I had been anticipating. We flew along the Pacific coastline, the plane rattling in the turbulence. The view of cargo ships waiting to enter the canal gave away to lush mountainous coastline sparsely dotted with zinc-roofed homes. We landed in the middle of a cow field in Pedasi, the airport was nothing more than a field and a small concrete structure that was the terminal. With every mile we drove from the airport, the road became less populated, so that by the time we pulled up to the site for AMA Estancia, it was all I could do to brace myself hard enough against the seat to stop my head from crashing into the ceiling. At one point, we had to get out and retrieve the bumper of the rental car and shove it in the trunk.
“I cannot live here!” I silently screamed as my head smashed against the door frame for the 100th time. Ivan would later say to me that it was too late to turn back now.
Pedasi was the nearest town to the site. When we moved there in 2008, the population was less than 1,000 people. It took all of 10 minutes to walk it from top to bottom. There was a single market not much bigger than an NYC bodega and a few small hotels, hostels and restaurants that were open whenever the proprietor felt like coming in, and that was it. The town shut down at 8PM and rose at 5AM. The nearest bank, pharmacy, grocery store and dentist were 45 minutes away. We rented a small yellow house in town, with cement block walls and a zinc roof. We worked from our home in town, and had to time our business calls around the neighbors' roosters, which were bred for cockfighting and sang all day long.
Our first order of business was to procure a solid contractor. For decades this tiny town had economically relied solely on farming and fishing. That began to change in the 90’s, when foreign investors discovered the charm of the Azuero coast. The beaches are out of this world and the land was a tabula rasa. A few hotels and restaurants began to pop up on the main road. By the time we arrived, the town was experiencing a development boom of its own, with two neighborhood developments being built just outside of town and another on the beach.
The only contractors in the area had come from Colombia or Europe with the wave of development, but were prone to bad habits, were owed money, or were burnt out. Our first clue that paradise could easily become the heart of darkness. We quickly ruled out the local cohort of contractors and the local gossip that trailed them, and began interviewing in Panama City, a 5-hour drive away. We hired Coneste in Panama City, who have become long term partners. They were great, but given the geographic distance, still had to rely on inexperienced local laborers to execute. While there was no shortage of prolific fisherman and strong farmers in town, skilled craftsmen were hard to come by. Most of the crew had never built a house or project of this scale, let alone a luxury home. Supervisors came from the city but usually didn't last long out in the elements of the countryside, often leaving the crew unsupervised. Which quickly translated to our supervision.
Scoping out the site before construction began.
A worker found a convenient backpack hook during construction.
It wasn’t just the remote management or unskilled labor slowing the project down. Afterall, craft can be taught, and what our crew lacked in experience they made up for in work ethic. The drawings had passed through several hands, and by the time they got to us, we found enough inaccuracies - columns that ran into windows and beams that were off the grid - that we knew we had to redraw them. On a 9-month timeline, it would end up taking us almost 6 months to redo all the drawings as each new phase - footings, foundations, structures - revealed more inaccuracies, and required more onsite training of the crew in absence of local supervisors. Eventually we realized the process would be streamlined and more effective if we just took over the construction finishes, and so we absorbed this role. Through a slow process of trial and error, we built a crack team - many of whom still work alongside us today.
Typically (ie. in New York) we’d visit the site about once a week and ensure everything was coming along according to the drawings. In Panama, we soon found ourselves on site every single day, fielding off complete stop-gaps in the work. In those early years, it took 45 minutes to get to the house from Pedasi on a dirt road that was hardly graded - it made construction difficult to say the least. On top of that, during the rainy season, the culverts would overflow, blocking our access to the site entirely and forcing work to stop. At the time there wasn't a concrete plant in town, therefore all the concrete for the house was mixed on site using portable concrete mixers. The site had no utilities; no power, no water, no sewage, no telecommunications. We quickly realized that if we wanted any sort of infrastructure in place - be it a road, a sewer or a fence to keep out the neighbors cows - we were going to have to fill that gap ourselves.
It was a massive amount of work, the challenges totally unforeseen back in NYC. Gone were my visions of taking Spanish classes in the evenings and leisurely weekend adventures. I did eventually become fluent in Spanish - in a trial by fire as we found ourselves directly managing our crew. Each evening, as we labored over the rugged road back to town in the dark, covered in dirt and sweat, we wondered what the hell we had gotten ourselves into and how this was ever going to get done. The construction was originally slated to take 9 months - a NYC timeline on a Panama budget - it turned out to be a crazy goal.
More on how we saw AMA Estancia through to first occupancy in our next post.