INFRASTRUCTURE

INFRASTRUCTURE

Today ever-expanding thresholds of speed, efficiency and communication are changing our definitions of space in completely unpredictable ways, and by extension challenging our understanding of architecture within the reconfigured global environment. Traditional concerns with permanence, typology and function no longer suffice as the limits according to which we design, theorize and build architecture today.

INFRASTRUCTUREHerzog De Meuron ‘Parking Garage,’ 2011

Infrastructural Urbanism

INFRASTRUCTURE

001 Flexibility/Anticipatory: By specifying what must be fixed and what is subject to change, they can be precise and indeterminate at the same time. They work through management and cultivation, responding quickly to adjust to shifting conditions.

002 Multiple Authorship: Infrastructure provides direction to future work in the city not by the establishment of rules or codes (ie. Top-down), but rather by fixing points of service, access and structure (ie. Bottom-up). In doing so, this creates a directed field where different ‘authors’ can contribute all the while setting both technical and instrumental limits to their work.

Infrastructural Urbanism

INFRASTRUCTURE

003 Responsive: In the design of highways, bridges, canals, or aqueducts an extensive catalog of strategies exist to respond to irregularities in the landscape (ie. doglegs, viaducts, cloverleafs, switchbacks, etc.) which are creatively employed to accommodate existing conditions while maintaining functional continuity.

Infrastructural Urbanism

INFRASTRUCTURE

“Infrastructures default condition is regularity” - Zaha Hadid -

004 Flow and Exchange: Although physically static in and of itself, ‘Infrastructure’ engender phenomenological notions such as ephemerality, movement, non-monumentality, flux, etc., which stand in contrast to societies preoccupation with ‘permanence’ and monumentality

Infrastructural Urbanism

INFRASTRUCTURE

“Infrastructural Architecture… where meaning is contextualized by the end user” - Rem Koolhaus -

005 Contraction/Expansion: Infrastructures allow for the detailed design of typical elements or repetitive structures, facilitating an architectural approach to urbanism. Instead of moving always down in scale from the general to the specific, infrastructural design begins with the precise delineation of specific architectural elements within specific limits, facilitating both contraction and expansion.

Infrastructural Urbanism

INFRASTRUCTURE

INFRASTRUCTURE

“Today, to a greater degree than ever before in the developed and developing parts of the world, dwelling environments will require greater architectural attention and consideration as their conception may have quite the opposite characteristics to those of sedentary culture. Increasingly dwelling environments will be premised upon being temporary, portable and collaboratively produced.”

-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari-

NOMADISM

ARCH

IGRA

M

Peter Cook, Archigram ‘Plug In City,’ 1962

ZAHA

HAD

ID

Zaha Hadid ‘Habitable Bridge,’ 1996

ASYM

PTOT

E

Asymptote ‘Steel Cloud,’ 1988

DILL

ER-S

COFI

DIO

Diller + Scofidio ‘Blur Building,’ 2002