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Agents of Transformation and the "Death" of Urbanism Preeminence of the Decorated Shed Staging Uncertainty |
[3L3] INFRATECTURE.Traditional urban planning in the West has produced the
decorated shed, which is equivalent to the first generation of clumsy machines mentioned
above. Ideal cities of the renaissance were depicted as perfectly organized collections of
buildings whose façades were matching and well-proportioned. Louis XIV demonstrated the
manifestation of power in the axis at Versailles, which Haussmann subsequently utilized in
his restructuring of Paris, cutting large swaths through the urban fabric and establishing
regular lines of building façades. The baroque plan and the gridiron similarly
established dominance over the landscape, ignoring the natural geography and its inherent
variety. The gridiron in America freed buildings from the all-encompassing fabric,
creating a field of multiple objects.  Today, office parks and suburban neighborhoods are planned in with
predictable organizational principles, based loosely on the campus plan; a well-organized
collection of dispersed buildings with complementary façades endowed with familiar
symbolic references to function – whether the domestic gable, the glazed corporate
lobby, or the shopping arcade. Western urban planning is thus characterized by the
application of pure, platonic geometries, and by the predominance of the façade.
With few exceptions, the city has always been conceived externally, from a
pedestrian or God’s Eye view. City planners and architects continue to play
compositional games with groups of object-buildings, paying extra attention to the pure
geometries and close matching of their façades, regardless of programmatic or functional
variances.
If cities are indeed complex, adapting, evolving organisms; in other words, like life – then why have the planning and design professions typically ignored this fact? Life is diverse, complex, irregular, and multifaceted. Planners instead seek homogeneity, regularity, and one-dimensionality. Kelly says, "In heterogeneity is creation of the world. A uniform entity must adapt to the world by occasional earth-shattering revolutions, one of which is sure to kill it. A diverse heterogeneous entity, on the other hand, can adapt to the world in a thousand daily minirevolutions, staying in a state of permanent, but never fatal, churning."118 Most importantly, life must be understood on a cellular level, and from its intricate internal mechanisms that lead to more complex forms. As Kelly says, "The only way to make a complex system [for example, a city] that works is to begin with a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex organization – such as intelligence or a market economy – without growing it, inevitably lead to failure... Complexity is created, then, by assembling it incrementally from simple modules that can operate independently."119
The lifeline which connects the cells, like the circulation of nervous system in the body, is the circuit. The circuit in architecture is analogous to infrastructure; roads, sewers, gas and water lines, etc. In terms of architectural vocabulary, however, the definition must be extended to apply to above-ground services such as elevators or escalators, corridors, and various mechanical and electrical services. Because these architectural devices also convey the life-blood of the city, they are therefore part of the circuit. City planners have long known the importance of high quality infrastructure ("all roads lead to Rome"), yet it is too often downplayed in the process of urban development. Bruce Webb and William Stern make the following point:  The city’s need to repair, augment, and expand its infrastructure is
an unglamorous technical necessity, akin to working on the plumbing in a house, yet the
infrastructure constitutes the most pervasive (if often hidden) part of the public
environment. Most American cities have pushed the infrastructure problem into the
background, relying on buildings to create the city’s postcard image. But inattention
to the quality of our streets, drainage systems, and utilities is the ultimate form of
urban denial... and efforts to improve the situation will not be helped by short-term
solutions or by considering infrastructure to be a compartmented series of technical
problems to be solved. Rather, improvements and expansions of the city’s
infrastructure should be thought of as opportunities for collaborations between engineers,
designers, and planners sensitive to the needs and desires of the city’s districts.120
In architecture, as well as urban design, the circuit is downplayed. While it may be considered an "unglamorous technical necessity," the circuit in architecture is no less important than it is to the body. A blood clot or stroke, after all, can be fatal. Likewise, improperly designed or maintained infrastructure can have a similar devastating effect. Why, then, are the professions of architecture and urban planning so one-sided? Unlike the medical profession, which tends to the needs and problems of all bodily functions, the design profession is heavily weighted toward the skin. Architects and planners are preoccupied with performing plastic surgery, "relying on buildings to create the city’s postcard image,"121 instead of the neurosurgery which is often much more important. Architects’ abandonment of the body for the skin is ultimately a failure because there is no longer a tangible connection. When architects apply make-up to a diseased body, architecture is no longer sustainable. Michael Bell asks, "How can architecture not represent the topological, but instead take part in averting its disciplinary machinations?"122 I call the pervasive circuit, which is both architectural and infrastructural, infratecture. Infratecture collapses the traditional divisions between architecture and engineering, vertical and subterranean development, and what is exposed and what is hidden. Infratecture suggests that form follows function, but based on diverse, multi-dimensional, operational mechanisms – unlike the generic, one-sided qualities of Modernism. As opposed to Typical Plan, infratecture is varied and idiosyncratic – like life itself – and related to specific processes and functions. Rather than ending at the envelope of a building, infratecture extends throughout the urban continuum, and therefore is not limited to one scale or one level of complexity. Infratecture recognizes the biological characteristics of cities, and their need to adapt, evolve, and become more complex. Infratecture is not to be understood from the outside, but from within. The infratect does not master plan the city with a heavy hand, but designs it incrementally with tangible modules that vary based on context and use (like life!). Infratecture is the threshold between atoms and bits; it is the interface at the megalopolitan scale. Infratecture is essential to the understanding of cities as vivisystems and the globalization of the interior. With infratecture, architects can invert the traditional master planning process, and reach beneath the skin into the body of architecture.
118Ibid., p. 469 119Ibid., p. 469 120Webb, Bruce C. and William F. Stern, "No Zoning but Many Zones" in Cite 32 (Houston: RDA, Fall 1994-Winter 1995) p. 15 121Ibid., p. 15 122Bell, Michael, "Architecture’s Geometries: Movement" (unpublished) Images: 1. Alliance Advanced Technology Center- a typical office park |
What, then, would be a simple module from which to create a
city? Buildings are no longer reliable; they have grown too large and fragmented for us to
treat them as understandable modules. The simple module – the cell – must
therefore be within our realm of comprehension. It must have a tangible scale and easily
recognizable function. It must be engageable. The cell might be a room, in the
traditional Hilberseimer sense, but is likely to suggest one or multiple operations, such
as a restroom or mechanical closet. A cell might actually not be inhabitable, like a
loading dock, ATM machine, or cooling tower; these devices are, after all, fundamental
units which collectively allow the operation of the post-industrial city. A complex cell
is a collection of inhabitable spaces and functional devices that behaves more or less
interdependently from other cells, but this interdependence does not suggest outdoor
spatial separation.
A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell. Copyright © 1998 by Blaine Brownell. All rights reserved. |
