Isolated Building Studies is the visual confluence of my interests in urban dynamism, socioeconomic inequality, and photography. By uniformly composing these images of Chicago buildings with no neighboring structures, I hope to suggest new ways of seeing the common impact of divergent investment processes on urban communities.

In Chicago, as in many places being remade by the transition to a post-industrial economy and the geographic segregation of marginalized groups, the social terrain is uneven. While density is the norm in the disproportionately whiter and wealthier parts of the city, many of the neighborhoods called home by people of color and those with lower incomes have been hollowed out by white flight, successive financial crises, and policies designed to extract rather than support.

Isolated buildings are particularly useful for exploring these structural changes because they are immediately recognized as unusual. As urban buildings, their form illustrates their connection with adjacent structures; theirs is a vertical, boxy architecture confined by palpably limited parcels. When their neighboring buildings are missing, the urban form clashes with what appears to be a suburban, even rural, setting. The tension is amplified by viewing the building in context, prompting the seemingly simple question "Why is this building isolated?" It is from this fundamental friction that Isolated Building Studies launches.

In resolving this conflict, physical details are helpful. In the case of older structures — discernible by their brickwork, ornamentation, and, often, the patina of neglect — we may see the remnants of previous neighbors: an uneven side wall, an arch that terminates at its apex rather than at the ground, a fence dividing claimed and apparently unclaimed territory. These physical aspects uniquely illustrate the history of the place as one of construction and destruction. The polarity is hindered, though, by the survival of the subject building and the efforts of those who ensured its endurance.

Yet isolation is not always the result of chipping away at urban material to leave a monolith behind. In other cases, the built environment is razed and a new freestanding building, typically identified by its pristine but unadorned façade, is constructed on the site. Often located on the edge of neighborhoods suffering from decades of divestment, these buildings represent the aspirations of community change. They stand as harbingers of a still unfolding transformation.

Crucially, the tension of isolation isn't only situated in the reading of landscape elements as old and new, in place and out of place. Isolated buildings occupy a certain duality of transformation: with the dissolution of one community comes the composition of another. Whether a building is a pioneer or a survivor, built by gentrification or decayed by divestment, the lone structure demonstrates how invisible social forces affect the visible aspects of our built environment, urban neighborhoods, and community relationships.

The specific character of change and its message varies by building type. Given their ubiquity, residential buildings comprise the core of the Studies. These most personal places are the bellwethers of dramatic economic development dynamics, expressing stability and change as they are maintained, eliminated, or replaced. As our homes go, so go our neighborhoods.

Commercial and community structures are featured in the Studies to signal the simultaneous connection and detachment of local institutions with residents. Given these buildings' roles as the economic, spiritual, and social loci of communities, their status indicates the health of those aspects of neighborhood life. When operating, they can be islands of stability for their constituents. When shuttered, commercial and community buildings are ambiguous symbols of social transition. A church may just as easily close because of divestment as gentrification, the absence nonetheless created by changes in the characteristics of local residents and their cultural orientations.

When viewed as a series, all too human patterns are clarified; buildings are recontextualized from their given environments into an abstracted neighborhood of isolation. In so doing, new construction and old, homes and businesses, rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods are placed side by side. The resulting continuities and juxtapositions call us to investigate relationships, to delve into common histories and reveal the political and economic forces leading to spatial — and social — isolation. This new method of seeing alters not only how we interpret what we perceive, but also which questions are raised. Instead of seeing one peculiar building, we see the legacy and immediacy of urban transformation. Beyond asking "Why is this building isolated?" we begin to wonder "What is causing this phenomenon?"

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