Miraflores Locks
Isthmian Canal Commission · Panama City, Panama · 1914
Miraflores Locks are one of the most legible architectural-engineering components of the original Panama Canal. Massive concrete chambers, paired lock gates, control buildings and service infrastructure lift and lower ships between the Pacific and Gatun Lake system. The complex demonstrates early twentieth-century engineering at an urban scale, where repetitive mechanical elements create a highly ordered industrial landscape. Its continued operation also makes the locks an unusually direct encounter with the physical systems that shaped Panama’s modern geography and economy.