Panama - a beautiful country with pristine beaches, incredible wildlife and rain forests - a third of its land set aside as protected areas - struggling through history from the Spanish invasion of the 1500s to a US invasion as recently as 1989.
Skyline from the Bay of Panama of the glass + steel metropolis of Panama City.
Highrises exceeding 70 stories - from rectalinear .....
..... to curalinear .....
..... to helical floor plates.
Construction of more highrises abounds across Panama City .....
..... as does the requisite ongoing maintenance of these mega structures.
Miraflores Locks at the Pacific end of the Panama Canal - an engineering marvel - at the interface between Central America and South America.
Looking east toward Gatun Lake that retains rainwater used to operate the locks entirely by gravity. A parallel set of locks currently under construction at a cost of $USD 5 billion is scheduled to open in 2014 to accomodate the world's largest vessels.
Historical photograph of the diversity of workers that built the exting locks. 22,000 workers died from malaria and yellow fever in less than a decade.
The old Colonial city of Casco Viejo.
Colorful character buildings remain.
While others have been painstakinly restored.
The next generation .....
