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THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE
Physical
Infrastructure introduces a systemic order, an identifiable armature to which other things can subsequently attach. At a larger scale, infrastructure often becomes the connective tissue that links fragments of existing programs, creating a larger and more visible network. A series of parks can establish an urban infrastructural network, with individual neighborhoods organizing themselves, both culturally and physically, around a specific park along the network. Alternatively, a system of repeating structural pylons that supports an overhead viaduct might become an organizing device that serves as points of reference for the neighborhoods nestled below.
Systemic Armatures
Like the grand structures of the Roman aqueducts, basic infrastructural amenities such as transportation, water, plumbing, electricity, and so on can operate as architectural armatures that spatially organize the complexes they serve. When visible, they become orienting devices that provide an underlying structure to the context within which they exist.
highways produce an independent, constructed landscape. The Hakozaki Interchange of the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway is a dense structural web of enormous scale, transforming the exterior spaces of the city into a cathedrallike interior.
uninterrupted circulation through the complex site, spanning existing highway and rail infrastructures while providing site drainage and remediation systems. Within the building, the topography is reiterated at a smaller scale, as a sequence that cuts through and connects its galleries. Finally, its exterior surfaces provide outdoor amphitheaters and exhibition areas, expanding the museum’s cultural program into the city.
The infrastructural network of Japan’s highway system follows an entirely independent spatial logic than the cities over which it passes. Motivated by automo-tive access to dense urban conditions with severe spatial constraints, these layers of
Weiss/Manfredi’s 2007 Seattle Art Museum: Olympic Sculpture Park blurs the boundaries between museum and city, building and landscape. Conceived as a continuous landscape linking the city’s sidewalks above to the waterfront esplanade below, the museum’s concept motivates all architectural and environmental decisions.
At the urban scale, its undulating topography both houses the museum’s principal galleries and service spaces and creates
its functionality, and its visibility. And like an orchestra, where each instrument contributes to the overall symphony, each network is also independent, serving a specific purpose and behaving in a specific way, yet together they operate to create the larger work.
Infrastructural systems can be physical or ephemeral. As a physical network, they are intermediary devices between the require-ments of the program for which they have been designed and the context in which they are located. A network of highways operates as an interface between the speed and turning radii of the automobile and the city or topography through which it passes.
Alternatively, one may have an ephemeral network that is not physically constructed.
For example, the Freedom Trail is a collection of buildings and sites where important events throughout Boston’s history have occurred. It is an historic armature that crosses time and space, marked by a simple red line inscribed on the sidewalks of Boston.
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Infrastructure introduce a series ofstructural ribbons that tip-toes three dimensionally across a newly constructed highway and from which pedestrians can experience an expanded and directed visual field.
the separate residential clusters is attached. The structures that support the raised channels overhead mediate between individual houses and shops and the adjoining public spaces while creating shaded loggias along which the residents circulate.
a spine of commercial activity to areas that would otherwise be too dangerous to venture within, much less service.
Here, infrastructure operates both as cultural lens and as connective and programmatic armature, transforming the context through which it passes.
Proyecto Urbano Integral (Integral Urban Project), The Metrocable San Javier, completed in 2008
Exquisitely thin armatures inscribe pedestrian movement over and through the Icelandic landscape—lift-ing skyward what appear to be mysterious traces of Viking passages. Studio Granda’s 2003 Footbridges over Hringbraut & Njardagata
At Álvaro Siza Vieira’s 1977 Quinta da Malagueira housing community in Évora, Portugal, a system of raised concrete aqueducts not only provides the infrastructure necessary for water and electric distribution but also an armature to which each of Introducing a formal circu- lation network into the informal hillside neighbor- hoods of Medellín, Colombia’s Metrocable links the crowded and marginalized, often dangerous, communities to the city’s primary subway routes. Floating gondolas that scan the densely populated landscape not only bring an audience to communities that are typically very insular, but the cable car stations introduce
buildings into primary faces, always demanding alternate forms of orientation and access. The continuity of this new linear park overlays an uninterrupted spatial experience onto what is typically the interrupted series of urban blocks and streets below.
Diller Scofidio + Renfro Architects and James Corner Field Operations with Piet Oudolf (Phases I, II , and III:
2009–15) An abandoned rail line that
once served to bring meat into lower Manhattan is transformed into an urban park, lifting pedestrians into a part of the city they were never intended to utilize.
This now occupiable infrastructure reframes the urban experience as it develops a secondary route that engages the city in unanticipated ways, transforming the previously inaccessible backs of
Scales of Engagement
Bus stops, street furniture, fountains, street lighting, and the like, are infrastructural elements whose details, textures, and dimensions introduce a scale of engagement that mediates the human body with its larger environment.
Evanescent
Making visible what is typically invisible or appropriating existing infrastructural elements in surprising ways are devices that can raise ecological consciousness, often introducing an unexpected dimension to an otherwise necessary, yet prosaic, function.
In other words, while infrastructural projects might be motivated by functional necessities, they can also provide shelter, recreational, environmental, and cultural amenities.
Cultural
Processional routes can be important infrastructural systems that reside in the memories or behaviors of the cultures in which they occur. Sometimes unmarked, it is through their occupation that they momen-tarily isolate a particular route within an otherwise unremarkable context. Pasadena, California’s annual Rose Parade celebrates
with the historic city, underscoring the bay rhythms and motifs of the city’s more public buildings.
Here, in Largo de João Franco, the round windows of the building at the end are translated into spheres of the
same diameter, which then serve a series of functions:
as fountain ornament, as boundaries for the pedestrian realm, and even as parking bollards.
In his meticulous urban renovations for Guimarães, Portugal (begun 1987), Fernando Távora uses paving, an occasional fountain, and various infrastructural elements to initiate what is, in effect, an analytic dialogue One of the ten themed
gardens at Parc de la Villette in Paris, France, Alexandre Chemetoff’s Bamboo Garden (1987) is sunken below the rest of the park. In so doing,
it not only creates an isolated and unique ecosystem of bamboo forests and falling waters, but also exposes the layers of infrastructure that normally remained concealed.
Here storm drainage pipes become elevated thresholds beneath which one moves, assembled into a network of bridges and walkways hovering above.
In the Netherlands, Thor ter Kulve converts the prosaic urban infrastructures of streetlights and fire hydrants, parking poles, and garbage receptacles into whimsical and unexpected programs.
Temporary installations attach themselves directly to existing structures, interpreting their intrinsic and passive functions into playful urban interventions.
A fire hydrant is transformed into sprinkler, a metal signpost into swing, a garbage can into barbeque, and a streetlight into glowing place marker.
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE
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Infrastructure the first day of the new year withflower-covered floats, horses, and bands as it follows a 5.5-mile (9 km) route defined primarily by the hundreds of thousands of spectators that line its sidewalks.
Circulatory
Circulation networks that are embedded within or overlaid upon existing urban landscapes are rendered “visible” by the bridges, shelters, or pathways that mark their trajectories. A bus route, for example, is populated at specific intervals throughout the day and night, marked by a series of shelters that line its path and that serve to trace a route that would otherwise be invisible.
Anticipatory
An infrastructural network can be open-ended—explicitly designed as an incomplete system that provides the framework for transformation over time. Because the precise requirements for future usage can never be known, with changes in population, changes in technology, and changes in society and taste, the network that antici-pates change will inevitably be the one that remains functional for the longest time.
Constructed from the material in which they are located, rocky cairns, like these in Iceland, are an example of way-finding devices that mark routes through often inhospitable landscapes. From each one, the next is perceived, bringing measure to an otherwise infinite horizon.
aquatic. Additionally, the spatial experience, and often the separation of one system from the other, is achieved through sectional and topographic manipulation, carefully calibrated to choreo-graph views or minimize conflicting programs and experiences.
Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux’s 1858–73 New York Central Park created a series of independent circulatory networks that was given material and dimensional specificity according to the particular program for which each was designed—be it vehicular, pedestrian, equestrian, or
THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE
The five main arteries that constitute the backbone of the Bus Rapid Transit system in Curitiba, Brazil, are identified through their raised cylindrical steel and glass bus stops through which
the riders pass, purchase tickets, and access the buses.
They provide not only shelter and functional requirements of accessibility and ticketing, but have the added functionality of news kiosks,
post offices, and small retail.
Dimensionally and formally suggestive of the buses to which they allow access, the kiosks mark a route that would otherwise be invisible.
Cedric Price’s 1960–61 Fun Palace is an example of a structural infrastructure—
in this case a steel grid of occupiable columns (contain- ing stairs, plumbing, electrical) and beams—one that antici- pates programmatic elements that could be subsequently attached or suspended. These
“plug-in” elements comprised floors, walls, and ceilings, as well as theaters, restaurants, and workshops; and, as with a theatrical production, the elements were to be easily mounted and demounted to produce a continuously transforming environment.
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InfrastructureAlejandro Aravena’s 2001 low-cost housing project, Quinta Monroy in Iquique, Chile, introduces an aggregation of standard concrete units that are intentionally incomplete,
with each unit subsequently and progressively modified by its inhabitants. An infrastructural field is introduced that facilitates individual transformation and yet resists total chaos.
In New York City, a series of urban infrastructural initiatives aims to construct the missing links of a continuous 32-mile (51 km) Waterfront Greenway Park that encircles Manhattan Island. SHoP Architects’ East River Waterfront Esplanade (2007–11) is defined by an armature of plug-in programs that include bicycle and pedes- trian paths, recreational, event, and community spaces with seating areas, all serving to define this urban infrastructure.
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THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE