Infrastructure as Instrument

T H E S I S F R A M E W O R K

Domain: position within the discourse
At its most basic level, urban design theory divides into utopian and natural models. The former relies on comprehensive vision and revision while the latter promotes incremental growth and gradual change. Architects must stake their authorship in the spectrum, and this study asserts that infrastructure is the tool for balancing top-down with bottom-up. Infrastructural operations offer large-scale design methodologies that exchange architects’ signature-making egos for leading roles in complex, collaborative place-making processes. By harnessing infrastructure’s design potential, architects can assume a more active and effective place among planners, developers, and other agents of urban change. Infrastructural architecture presents a conceptual framework for open-ended inter-scalar design, as advocated by contemporary architectural theorists and practitioners such as Stan Allen, Jesse Reiser, MVRDV, and FOA. These architects in turn follow the legacy of (among others) the Metabolists, Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, the Smithsons, and the Situationists.
Currently, spatially significant infrastructural elements belong to—or can be broken up into—one of two generic components, termed by Stan Allen corridor and patch. Corridor refers to a linear configuration, ranging in scale from The High Line to the Panama Canal. Patch denotes its nonlinear counterpart, manifesting in forms as diverse as Paris’ place and Tokyo’s depato. This thesis proposal investigates both corridor and patch in addition to a third, more nuanced iteration: the emergent point.

Objectives: goals / intents / questions
One fundamental urban question is primary for this thesis: how does an architect give space to the active unfolding of urban life without abrogating his responsibility to provide some form of order? In my proposal, I use infrastructure as a mediating force to concede and embrace an operative realism regarding architects’ design control. My intent is not to define specified functions, but to charge a field wherein a range of possible events might take place. Infrastructure operates in the continuum between utopian conception and dystopian response. Evading pro- and anti- rhetoric, it suspends judgment and tunes itself to forces at work in the urban environment.

Proposition: how the objectives can be met
My proposal coordinates urban forces, activating its context to produce a range of overlaps, adjacencies, and simultaneities. Its open webs condense and recalibrate patterns of urban life. Internal connections govern my proposal more than by any global figure. Porously interconnected, nodes and transitional spaces form a fabric of variable space. In the shift from architecture to urbanism, a corresponding shift occurs in my proposal’s organizational logic. In place of cellular aggregation a new, more clearly hierarchical organizational pattern appears. Stems branch laterally, allocating regions and clusters of density.