Research Triangle Park (2018-2023) is a survey of the largest tech park in the U.S. SPanning 7,000 acres, it’s essentially a suburb made of office parks. Conceived in the 1960s to combat “brain drain”—North Carolina graduates leaving an agricultural and industrail state for science and tech jobs elsewhere—much of it sats empty, even more so in the wake of the pandemic.
Despite this, RTP remained in a constant state of expansion. When I began photographing there, hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space sat vacant. By the end of this project, that number had climbed to three million, with two million more under construction. What began as a regional portrait became a real-time document of the overdevelopment that lead to a commercial real estate crisis. It originally was meant to be a cautionary tale about the inflated promises of the tech industry, another aspect that feels even more pervasive now.
RTP is (or was) a developer’s dream, with North Carolina eager, as always, to accomidate development. Along the same winding roads, goverment, biotech, pharmaceutical, healthcare, and tech industries coexist —often in secrecy. The privacy is part of the appeal for these companies. As a result, the images reflect this lack of access.
This series is still being edited and iterated.
<---back to main
