SESSION 4: INFRASTRUCTURAL URBANISM_____STAN ALLAN

Stan Allen starts this text by giving three images spanning across the 20th century and explains how the shift from technologies of production to technologies of reproduction and display to mega infrastructure projects and how does the infrastructure incorporates in the discipline of architecture.
Image 1 – bow of and aircraft carrier, which stands for a moment in which technical and the aesthetic formed a unified whole, representing the instrumentality of advanced engineering design and organization of the forces of production.
Image 2 – the linear Andrea Doria(warship), recalling a iconic status of the liner in the theory of modern architecture depicting a modernist project in the postwar era.
Image 3 – B 24 bomber factory assembly line, showing the modernist dream of rational production under the pressures of wartime economy. This factory floor is the ideal space of early modernism, then the museum is the emblematic space of postmodernity.
These images mark a shift from models of formal organization and meaning that work with transparency and depth, to a condition of shallow surfaces, in which meaning resides in graphic information lying on the surface. More than the historical reference it is the presence of this semiotic structuralist model that identifies postmodernism in architecture. But once architecture’s signifying capacity has been opened up, no limit could be placed on significant content. One effect from this shift towards images and signs is that architecture’s disciplinary frame shifts and finds itself in competition with other discursive media-painting, film, literature a field in which architecture often seems to come up short. Architecture’s relationship to its material is however indirect. Unlike activities such as gardening or woodworking where something concrete is made by direct contact with material. In the united states the public investment in civic works is all time low and architects cannot be logically be held accountable for these complex political and economical shifts, it might be argued that by the production of theoretical framework to justify an architecture of surface and sign, architects have, consciously or not, participated in their own marginalization.
The author then argues that even if architects have been excluded from the development of the city(giving example of Foucault) he then says how architecture as a field has to do more than only aesthetic to go beyond deciding guidelines. Architects have themselves retreated from the questions of function, implementation, technique, finance, and material practice. While architects are relatively powerless to provoke the changes necessary to generate renewed investment in infrastructure they can begin to redirect their own imaginative and technical efforts towards a question of infrastructure. Infrastructural urbanism offers a new model of practice and a renewed sense of arcitecture’s potential to structure the future potential of the city. Michel Foucault says “architects are not the engineers or technicians of the three great variables: territory, communication, speed”. As an assessment of the current situation it should be pointed out that historically this has not been the case. Territory, communication, and speed are properly infrastructural problems, and architecture as a discipline has developed specific technical means to deal effectively with these variables. Mapping, projection, calculation, notation, and visualization are among architecture’s traditional tools for operating at a very large scale. Architecture is uniquely capable of structuring the city in ways not available to practices such as literature, film, politics, installation arts, or advertising. Complimenting it the author quotes Walter Benjamin, “construction fulfills the role of the unconscious” meaning that the capacity of certain structures to act as scaffold for a complex series of events not anticipated by the architect.


SEVEN PROPOSITIONS –
1.Infrastructure prepares the ground for future building and creates the conditions for future events.
2.Infrastructure work with time and open to change.
3.Infrastructure give direction to future work in the city not by giving rules and conduct but by fixing points of service, access and structure(bottom up approach).
4.Infrastructure accommodates design also with existing conditions while maintaining functional continuity its default condition is regularity.
5.Infrastructure organizes and manages complex systems of flow, movement and exchange.
6.Infrastructure systems work like artificial ecologies managing flows of energy, resources on site directing density and distribution of a habitat.
7.Infrastructure allow detailed design of typical elements or repetitive structures facilitating and architectural approach to urbanism.