About Me

Field Memory — measured drawings of a life: an arcade house, a garden atrium, flowering dogwood, a bowl of wonton noodles, and encaustic floor tiles — Field Memory — Measured Drawings of a Life, Plate 01

I grew up in Guangzhou, in a city best explained by its ordinary things — the arcade houses that carry pedestrians through the rainy season, the patterned floor tiles worn smooth at the threshold, a bowl of wonton noodles served the same way for decades. None of it was called heritage; it was simply how life worked. I have been trying to take the measure of that kind of ordinary ever since.

I trained first as a landscape architect, at Purdue University and then in practice in Guangzhou, where I worked on the adaptive reuse of a historic textile plant. The evening a band I loved played the live house inside the complex we had designed, I understood that preservation is less about freezing a place than about returning it to life. At Cornell University I turned to historic preservation planning — tracing New York State's vanished kitchen gardens for my thesis, writing a cultural landscape report for a museum in Auburn, leading an eleven-person community design team in a lakeside village, and mapping the Underground Railroad network in Ithaca.

These days my work centers on Indiana. I research and write about the state's overlooked past: drive-in banks built for a city learning to live with the automobile, a ballpark that found new life after its team moved on, a school once held up as a model. I also build digital tools that put preservation within reach: mapping Green Book sites, helping reviewers identify historic properties in Section 106 review, and finding the consulting parties who belong at the table.

My research now follows the Chinese restaurants of Indiana and the network behind them: where the food, the labor, and the capital came from. It began with the Bamboo Inn, which spent twenty-seven years in the Circle Theater on Monument Circle. The theater's National Register nomination records the building, down to the figures in its frieze. The restaurant on its ground floor was a business, tied by its partners and cooks to restaurants across the state. It is the same ordinary I grew up among, and most of its history is still unwritten.