A recent report in the New York Times which looks at global marriage patterns from an economic perspective contains the following fascinating excerpt, which indicates that China’s one-child policy, “combined with a cultural preference for sons and technologies that permit selective abortion”, has indirectly produced a proliferation of phantom third floors on Chinese houses:

…evidence suggests that young Chinese women and their families have in fact become much more selective in recent years.

They appear, for example, to focus more critically on the earnings potential of prospective mates. Because house size is often assumed to be a reliable signal of wealth, a family can enhance its son’s marriage prospects by spending a larger fraction of its income on housing. (Other families can follow the same strategy, of course, but when all families do so, the resulting homes are still reliable indicators of relative wealth.) Such a shift appears to have occurred.

For example, when Shang-Jin Wei, an economist at Columbia University, and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute examined the size distribution of Chinese homes, they found that families with sons built houses that were significantly larger than those built by families with daughters, even after controlling for family income and other factors. They also generally found that the higher a city’s male-to-female ratio, the bigger the average house size of families that have sons.

Mr. Wei reports that many families with sons have begun to add a phantom third story to their homes, one that looks normal from the outside but whose interior space remains completely unfinished.

“Marriage brokers are familiar with the tactic,” he reports, “yet many refuse to schedule meetings with a family’s son unless the family house has three stories.”

This — a kind of architectural extension of ritual courting displays — could be read as an odd corollary to the American predilection for viewing the home primarily as an investment strategy, which mammoth has previously written about.  In both cases, the home’s function as shelter (or machine for living) is subsumed by its financial potential, whether it serves to display wealth or produce it — and it would be quite interesting to learn if this shift in the function of the home has had the kind of bizarre side-effects in China that it has had in the States.

We recently wrote a brief piece, “Appeal”, for the excellent architecture journal Quaderns in response to their most recent issue, “Parainfrastructures”. We used this response as an opportunity to consider why we are so drawn to infrastructural landscapes like Blue Plains — not just as sites of logistical and technological operations, but aesthetically as well:

Let us suppose for a moment that the “Parainfrastructures” which Quaderns #262 concerns itself with are a class of things, that object-parodying helium balloons hovering around Heathrow Airport to block its expansion, inflatable “instant cities” powered by air compressors, “geodesic domes, parachutes, spray-foam dwellings, zomes, space frames”, “indoor built and ephemeral complexes” colonizing the open floor plans of abandoned airports, and architectural systems of “air control” can be read as a category of architectural objects called “parainfrastructures”. Even though we will be supposing in error—because “Parainfrastructures” never seeks to delineate its subject matter by so crude a means as a definition—this seems a productive error, because it permits us to see a pervasive weirdness.

This weirdness, in the context of architectural critique, is that parainfrastructures paradoxically gain their strength and appeal from having been designed with a certain disregard for aesthetics. Parainfrastructures are constructed out of the banal materials of twentieth-century industrial innovation like synthetic fabrics, geotextiles, and industrial plastics, not the refined and expensive finishes of high-corporate architecture. Structurally, they depend on ties, straps, bendable rods, and air compressors—temporary, flexible, contingent engineering.

Read the whole piece at Quaderns and, while you’re there, think about ordering the full issue; it’s well worth your time, as it features contributions from John May, Enrique Ramirez, Roger Sauquet, Javier García-Germán, and more.

[Image via photographer Steve Jackson on Flickr]

Last spring, Mammoth visited the Blue Plains Wastewater Treatment Plant. This massive facility — which claims to be the largest plant of its particular kind in the world — exists to remove the solids that the 2 million residents of Washington, D.C. and surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia introduce into wastewater from their parking lots, their laundry, and their toilets.

Blue Plains creates clean water by refining influent, removing particles of ever-decreasing physical scale. It separates true waste components from useful nutrients from clean water. Facilities like Blue Plains — not just sewer and wastewater treatment, but garbage dumps, power plants, distribution centers, ports, and a thousand others — are both massive and critical to the function of cities, yet often have minimal visibility. This lack of visibility can be intensely problematic, particularly in a democratic society, because it distances the public both from the utility of infrastructural facilities — which often translates into neglect and a lack of will to develop and execute long-term vision — and from any problems those facilities might create through their operation — again, resulting in a failure to improve or re-think those infrastructures.

A key theme in the contemporary operation of many infrastructural facilities, and of Blue Plains in particular, which deserves this visibility is a growing shift from linear processes (extraction, use, disposal) toward cyclical processes (use, extraction, re-use).  In an article called “Landscapes of Disassembly” in Topos 60, Pierre Belanger describes this transition:

“Though the economic and ecological histories of Europe, Asia and North America may differ, they all present compelling examples for understanding the latent reciprocity between industry, waste and urbanism. As a result of global legislation – such as the 1992 Basel Convention that prohibited the transnational movement of hazardous wastes – the pre-eminence of waste colonialismin the 20th century is now a thing of the past. Multilateral strategies, including waste diversion, separation, recycling, composting and remanufacturing, are proving effective as durable alternatives to conventional systems of waste management that previously relied on consolidated forms of disposal. With skyrocketing costs of mining, surging fuel prices and growing patterns of urbanization, exhausted economies are being jumpstarted through combined strategies of economic regeneration and ecological reclamation, where water, land, energy and waste are becoming the bedrock of a new world economy. Dismantling the Old World notion of the city, urban-industrial synergies never before possible are forming beyond metropolitan areas, signaling the birth of a new and diffused urban economic pattern that is best described as an operational ecology held together by supply chains and distribution networks.”

While it’s obvious that a treatment plant handles water in this fashion (indeed, the reason plants like this were first developed was to combat the severe pollution of waterways where waste water was disposed, and the process of waste water treatment mimics — in an accelerated fashion — the natural cleaning processes of waterbodies¹), this isn’t the only cycle Blue Plains engages. Take, for instance, this excerpt from a Foreign Policy essay about peak phosphorous, followed by two quotes from our tour guide:

“From Kansas to China’s Sichuan province, farmers treat their fields with phosphorus-rich fertilizer to increase the yield of their crops. What happens next, however, receives relatively little attention. Large amounts of this resource are lost from farm fields, through soil erosion and runoff, and down swirling toilets, through our urine and feces. Although seemingly mundane, this process cannot continue indefinitely. Our dwindling supply of phosphorus, a primary component underlying the growth of global agricultural production, threatens to disrupt food security across the planet during the coming century. This is the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.”

‘In 30 years, OPEC will stand for Organization of Phosphorous Exporting Countries.’ ²

‘Wastewater treatment plants are estimated to control 20% of all agricultural nutrients in the United States.’

Blue plains doesn’t just process water — it also processes all of the things that we put into water, which are very often things we need back. Our tour guide said that he preferred to think of Blue Plains as a ‘nutrient reclamation facility’ instead of merely wastewater treatment. This seems apt. Many of the newest and most impressive technologies we saw weren’t so much about making the cleanest water possible — these facilities have been very good at that for some time — but about refining what they pull from the water into a useful substance (such as biosolids for use in agriculture and brownfield rehabilitation) or processing  unusable byproducts more efficiently.

And so our blog tour is split into two parts. The first, making liquids more liquid, traces water refinement, which culminates in discharge into the Potomac. The second, making solids more solid, is about the cycles within the wastewater treatment cycle, about how we reclaim valuable matter from our feces and runoff, and configure that matter for re-use.

A final note before we begin the tour: it’s worth keeping in mind Peter Nunns’s post on fecal politics in India as you read this. The contrast here — between the struggle for something so basic as access to adequate sanitary facilities and the incredible technological forces brought to the refinement and reclamation of water and useful material from wastewater here — is as clear an example as any of the way treatment of feces mirrors a society’s values, wealth, and technological capabilities.

MAKING LIQUIDS MORE LIQUID
headworks

primary treatment sedimentation tanks

secondary treatment reactors

secondary treatment sedimentation Tanks

nitrification/denitrification

secondary treatment reactors, secondary sedimentation, nitrification / denitrification reactors and sedimentation

final filtration and chlorination

discharge

MAKING SOLIDS MORE SOLID
gravity sludge thickeners

dissolved air flotation tanks and centrifuge room

biosolids storage silo and loading

control center and electrical substation

blue plains

[This concludes our tour of Blue Plains. We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the fine people at Blue Plains for generously taking their time to show us around and answer all our questions.

In our experience, it isn't uncommon to be able to tour infrastructural facilities like this. We strongly encourage it, and hope to read dispatches from our infrastructural present by folks across the country.]

[Residue Treatment Center (or CTRV) in Vacarisses, designed by Batlle i Roig. While the CTRV is a municipal solid waste treatment facility, not a wastewater treatment facility (where flushed feces usually go), the two kinds of facilities are commonly linked by the need to dispose of solid materials separated out of water at wastewater treatment facilities.

Photographs by Francisco Urrutia via Quaderns #262 "Parainfrastructures", where you can read more about the project.]

[Top, the Hampton Roads region, home to the Port of Virginia, and above, the Norfolk International Terminal.]

When a cargo container is offloaded at one of the marine terminals of the Port of Virginia, a funny thing often happens.

Let’s say that the container — which might, for instance, have been loaded in Hong Kong, transited the Pacific Ocean, and crossed the American continents at the Panama Canal — is picked off a container ship by a container gantry crane at the Norfolk International Terminal, one of the four terminals within the Port of Virginia’s distributed network of terminals around the Hampton Roads region.  There is a good chance that it will then be loaded onto a double-stack railcar by a straddle carrier or rubber-tyred gantry crane, and travel around two hundred miles on the tracks of the Norfolk-Southern Railway to the small city (calling it a city is rather generous) of Front Royal, where it will be offloaded at the Virginia Inland Port. Here’s the funny thing — only then do its contents finally enter the United States of America.

[The Virginia Inland Port in Front Royal, Virginia.]

When the shipping container is (rightly) treated as a transformative technology, it is usually the physical properties of the container that are cited as generating transformations: the standardized measurement of the twenty-foot equivalent unit both permitting and demanding the standardization of port spaces, container ships, and distributive mechanisms like tractor-trailers and railcars, for instance. But the legal properties of the container (which, it should be noted, are only possible because of the physical capacity of the container to be sealed in such a manner that opening it permanently breaks the seal) are also transformative, and it is these weird legal properties that produce the funny situation of goods being two hundred miles inside a nation’s borders and yet still, for all intents and purposes, in a foreign country.

In the rather dry manner typical of government bureaucracies, the U.S. Customs and Border Protections explain this in one of their key publications, “Importing into the United States: A Guide for Commercial Importers” (pdf):

“Imported goods are not legally entered until after the shipment has arrived within the port of entry, delivery of the merchandise has been authorized by CBP, and estimated duties have been paid.”

The shipping container, you see, is something of a minature, portable, re-definable border. When it is sealed, goods are frozen in their country of origin, and cannot be removed from that country through any physical operation short of breaking the seal and stealing them. In this way, the shipping container is like a bizarre embassy: portable instead of stationary, for goods instead of people, logistical instead of architectural, but similarly self-contained and exported territory. Both the shipping container and the embassy reveal that borders are, at the same time, fictional — receiving their status as entities that exist through the agreement to treat them as though they exist, and thus being as malleable as we collectively decide we want them to be — and quite capable of affecting material relations, as noting that they are fictional by no means implies that they lack the capacity to draw geographies or generate landscapes.

[Port of Hong Kong; source.]

Having been granted this status, the container becomes legally frictionless, able to transcend borders and geographies freely, at least until it arrives at a customs station. To move through a country, a container never needs to enter that country; it can exist solely within the legal weightlessness of foreign trade zones¹, even serving as a microcosm of those legal states when it exits their spatial boundaries (such as when it travels from a seaport to an inland port of entry). The goods in a container loaded and sealed in Hong Kong remain legally in China, no matter what soil the container rests on, until such a time as the owner decides to have them processed at a customs station.

Yes, this is a restricted geography. A container cannot arrive at a seaport, bypass customs, and travel freely within the country of destination; but within that restricted geography — along rail-lines and in anonymous stacks — the container is oddly weightless. No person could arrive at the border of the United States, declare himself a microcosm of China, and travel freely to the airport customs line of her choosing; the comparative freedom granted to the movement of goods seems appropriately representative of the relative primacy of consumer goods in the post-Fordist economy. Perversely, the container is even co-opted by people desperate to emigrate from or immigrate to certain nation-states — essentially, people attempt to pass as goods, in order to obtain the legal advantages conveyed on goods.

[A gantry crane operates at an intermodal facility in North Baltimore, Ohio; source.]

The connection may not be immediately obvious but this — all of this, including the transformative physical properties of the container briefly noted above — is why the architectural fetish for the form of the container is ultimately unsatisfying. Even though the spatial qualities of the box are transformative, the form of the container is ultimately not what it is interesting about the container; what is interesting and important about the container is the way that it enables and generates new landscapes. This is not to say that is impossible to do interesting architecture with shipping containers. It is just as possible to do interesting architecture with shipping containers as it is possible to do interesting architecture with chain-link fence, corrugated aluminum, or any other industrial material. But the power of the shipping container cannot be appropriated by using the object in alternate contexts, because the power of the object comes from its capacity to shape its context.

Keller Easterling said this well in a 1999 piece for Perspecta, “The New Orgman”; though the portion of the piece that we quote here refers to the architecture of mid-century suburbia, the piece later touches on ports and containers, and the quote applies equally well to the container:

“The architecture [is] organizational. The organizational protocol [is] not merely that which facilitate[s] architecture; it [is] architecture… For architects, nouns and objects that can be identified with formal nomenclature are more familiar than processes, verbs, and games. It is hard to grasp the idea that the medium is the message or that the organization is the content.”

Hard, but worthwhile.

While there is a lot that has gone unfortunately unposted this summer (our drafts queue is more than a little bit out of control) — at least in part due to Rob’s failure to contain the floods series (which is finished, by the way, with yesterday’s final post on de-damming the Dutch delta) to anything like a reasonable length — there are a number of exciting things going on at mammoth behind the scenes.

Some of them will hopefully make appearances here in the coming months; some of them may also manifest, but in other ways; and some of them are likely to take quite a while to mature to the point that they have a public manifestation, but those might be the ones we’re most excited about.  (Very vague, we know.)

Two particular academic matters seem worth noting at the moment.  First, Stephen is in the midst of evaluating real estate development graduate programs, and is consequently anticipating a possible return to school in the near-or-mid future.  Second, Rob is teaching studio for the first time this fall in Virginia Tech’s MLA program, at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center.

It’s unclear what this will mean for the blogging in the fall; perhaps these things will leave us energized and imaginations fertilized; perhaps they will drain us, and blogging will be light.  That will be what it is, either way.  There is a medium-sized backlog of things we wrote over the summer (while the blog was occupied with the flood series), and we expect to publish those over the coming month.  This should include text from our talk at Infranetlab’s Pamphlet Architecture launch at Storefront, a long update to the Preliminary Atlas of Gizmo Landscapes that Rob presented at MediaLab Prado, another student project or two, some excellent guest posts, and, apropos of that last item, a week about shit. Literally.

Finally, some of our good friends have been working on Border Town, “an independent design studio about divided cities”. They are in the midst of an exhibit we are sorry to be missing in Detroit, but we’ll have a contribution up shortly to the online discussion they’ve been fostering.

With that caveat in place, there is one specific aspect of these events (or, really, the analysis of these events) that we find curious.  It has been hard to escape the flood of commentary (for example) that attributes the catalysis and successful organization of the revolution to Twitter and Facebook.  But despite the key role that Tahrir Square played and how closely it became associated with the revolution itself, there has been little analysis of the role of public space — which we find just as interesting as the role of social media — in a successful revolution [1].  (One notable exception to this that we are aware of is the New York Times‘ day-by-day mapping of the protests here and here.)

Questions come easily to mind.  How would the revolution have been different if the public spaces of Cairo were different?  What if the protestors had been forced to carry out their protests on narrow streets, where the sheer magnitude of the crowd could never be captured in a single gaze, as it could in Tahrir?  Both the pitched din of outrage carried across social media and the pitched battles between protestors and pro-Mubarak forces occurred in kinds of space (albeit very different kinds of space), but can a revolution sustain itself in space without becoming physically instantiated?  How does this relationship change when physical space can be hacked from virtual space?  What conclusions about the role of public space in peaceful revolution could be drawn from a comparative study of how revolutionaries used the public spaces of Tunis, Cairo, and Alexandria?

[via The Big Picture]

This story in the Wall Street Journal (not behind a paywall at the time of this post, but that may change) paints a fascinating picture of the ways in which the planners of the Egyptian protests considered specific spatial characteristics of their city in tandem with the logistics of communication, the willingness of potential participants to join, and the expected resistance from establishment organizations:

They chose 20 protest sites, usually connected to mosques, in densely populated working-class neighborhoods around Cairo. They hoped that such a large number of scattered rallies would strain security forces, draw larger numbers and increase the likelihood that some protesters would be able to break out and link up in Tahrir Square.

The group publicly called for protests at those sites for Jan. 25, a national holiday celebrating the country’s widely reviled police force. They announced the sites of the demonstrations on the Internet and called for protests to begin at each one after prayers at about 2 p.m.

But that wasn’t all.

“The 21st site, no one knew about,” Mr. Kamel said.

[...]
They sent small teams to do reconnaissance on the secret 21st site. It was the Bulaq al-Dakrour neighborhood’s Hayiss Sweet Shop, whose storefront and tiled sidewalk plaza—meant to accommodate outdoor tables in warmer months—would make an easy-to-find rallying point in an otherwise tangled neighborhood no different from countless others around the city.

The plotters say they knew that the demonstrations’ success would depend on the participation of ordinary Egyptians in working-class districts like this one, where the Internet and Facebook aren’t as widely used. They distributed fliers around the city in the days leading up to the demonstration, concentrating efforts on Bulaq al-Dakrour.

[...]
In the days leading up to the demonstration, organizers sent small teams of plotters to walk the protest routes at various speeds, to synchronize how separate protests would link up.

On Jan. 25, security forces predictably deployed by the thousands at each of the announced demonstration sites. Meanwhile, four field commanders chosen from the organizers’ committee began dispatching activists in cells of 10. To boost secrecy, only one person per cell knew their destination.

[...]
The other marches organized at mosques around the city failed to reach Tahrir Square, their efforts foiled by riot-police cordons. The Bulaq al-Dakrour marchers, the only group to reach their objective, occupied Tahrir Square for several hours until after midnight, when police attacked demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets.

It was the first time Egyptians had seen such a demonstration in their streets, and it provided a spark credited with emboldening tens of thousands of people to come out to protest the following Friday. On Jan. 28, they seized Tahrir Square again. They have stayed there since.

[via The Atlantic]

But why was Tahrir Square so important to the success of the protest?

A reading of the urban space of Cairo informed by both the revolution and Canetti’s Crowds and Power might go a long ways towards answering this. After opening the book with an argument that “there is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown”, Canetti continues:

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched… the crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose physical constitution is also dense or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him… the more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is the greatest.

The open and closed crowd
As soon as [the crowd] exists at all, it wants to consist of more people: the urge to grow is the first and supreme attribute of the crowd. It wants to seize everyone within reach; anything shaped like a human being can join it. The natural crowd is the open crowd; there are no limits whatever to its growth; it does not recognize houses, doors or locks and those who shut themselves in are suspect. “Open is to be understood here in the fullest sense of the word; it means open everywhere and in any direction. The open crowd exists so long as it grows; it disintegrates as soon as it stops growing.

For just as suddenly as it originates, the crowd disintegrates. In its spontaneous form it is a sensitive thing. The openness which enables it to grow is, at the same time, its danger. A foreboding of threatening disintegration is always alive in the crowd. It seeks, through rapid increase, to avoid this for as long as it can; it absorbs everyone, and, because it does, must ultimately fall to pieces.

In contrast to the open crowd which can grow indefinitely and which is of universal interest because it may spring up anywhere, there is the closed crowd.

The closed crowd renounces growth and puts the stress on permanence. The first thing to be noticed about it is that it has a boundary. It establishes itself by accepting its limitation. It creates a space for itself which it will fill. This space can be compared to a vessel into which liquid is being poured and whose capacity is known. The entrances to this space are limited in number, and only these entrances can be used; the boundary is respected whether it consists of stone, of solid wall, or of some special act of acceptance, or entrance fee. Once the space is completely filled, no one else is allowed in. Even if there is an overflow, the important thing is always the dense crowd in the closed room; those standing outside do not really belong.

The boundary prevents disorderly increase, but it also makes it more difficult for the crowd to disperse and so postpones its dissolution. In this way the crowd sacrifices its chance of growth, but in staying power. It is protected from outside influences which could become hostile and dangerous and it sets its hope on repetition. It is the expectation of reassembly which enables its members to accept each dispersal. The building is waiting for them; it exists for their sake and, so long as it is there, they will be able to meet in the same manner. The space is theirs, even during the ebb, and in its emptiness it reminds them of the flood.

[from open protest to closed camp - click through to BBC for interactive version]

What’s instructive about Canetti’s crowd theory is the importance it places on a crowd’s self-perception, particularly how it perceives its own density, which in turn affects its ability to either grow forcefully or remain resilient. Social media clearly can augment these perceptions, especially during the nascent stages of a protest (and, of course, provides space for lines of communication that are not available in physical space). But when a revolution like Egypt’s calls for bodies in the streets, the space of those streets deserves detailed consideration as well.

It’s easy to imagine this becoming a terrific urban design studio — streets for people extended to streets for permanent revolution, re-working the fabric of cities to better accommodate the ability of the seemingly-powerless masses to exert their mass against ruling elites — thick with both exciting spatial possibilities and thorny ethical problems.

[Thanks to Nam Henderson for some of the above links. Also check out the website for the Urban Design and Civil Protest exhibit (h/t Kush Patel), particularly Max Page's essay, for more on this topic.]

Though the central aim of the article is to provide a set of principles for what Brown describes as “the next generation” of American public infrastructures, the article can really be divided into three parts.  First, Brown provides an excellent summary of what might be called the infrastructural public policy problem:

Unfortunately, despite its ambitious label, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act doesn’t even begin to get us to [a] next generation [of infrastructures]. ARRA’s investment in infrastructure — $132 billion out of the total package of $787 billion — is a fraction of current needs, and for the most part it bolsters our dependence on dirty, carbon-intensive construction, underwriting an assortment of backlogged, so-called shovel-ready projects. (As of this writing, there is insufficient detail on the breakdown of the Administration’s proposed $50 billion in additional funding to merit comment.) Twenty percent of ARRA’s infrastructure funding, or $27.5 billion, is dedicated to roads and bridges, which overshadows the $17.7 billion for mass transit and rail systems. [1] $8 billion is targeted for nuclear power plant remediation, but just $2.5 billion for renewable energy networks. The $4.5 billion allocated to basic electrical grid upgrades [2] is a mere tenth of the projected $40 to $50 billion needed. [3]

In prioritizing private over public transportation and short-changing cleaner energy projects, ARRA has undercut the Obama administration’s claim to support a green economy. Still more worrisome, unbalanced investments that favor the old over the new position us unfavorably in comparison to other industrialized nations, which are investing heavily in public transit and renewable energy. [4] Worse yet, they perpetuate America’s disproportionately high per-capita carbon dioxide emissions: approximately 20 metric tons to Europe’s 9 and India’s 1.07. [5] Ultimately, of course, ARRA was more stop-gap compromise than comprehensive vision — and no doubt the hard-fought result of tense partisan politics. Still, ARRA 2009 will be remembered as a tragically missed opportunity at a pivotal moment in national history. And now, it seems, given the tepid response to the latest proposed infusion of funding, complacency may have set in; a public that has misconstrued a short-term stimulus as a long-range solution seems more focused on shrinking government than on endorsing investments in a 21st-century American infrastructure.

Brown is hardly the first to note this, but it is refreshing to see an article that aims at providing design principles for infrastructure begin by acknowledging the depth and scope of the gap between America’s need for new infrastructures and the political will to fund the construction of those infrastructures.  (The article perhaps fails to sufficiently emphasize the contribution of NIMBYist forces and dysfunctional political structures to the infrastructural crisis she describes, but it at least hints in those directions.  As we’ve discussed those matters elsewhere and, we are sure, will continue to discuss them in the future, we’re following Brown’s lead in this post.)

The third piece of Brown’s article (we’ll get to the second in just a minute) responds to this first challenge, making a proposal for a federal pilot program for infrastructural innovations:

Imagine, for instance, a small federal program aligned with the proposed National Infrastructure Bank, which would be charged with seeding progressive investment agendas and identifying promising infrastructural systems. This new program could privilege projects that were multi-purpose, carbon-efficient and resilient, and based upon well-developed regional transportation or public utility plans. It might recruit domestic or foreign investment, award grants, and provide loans or tax credits. It might award challenge grants, for example, to public/private infrastructural partnerships that integrate land use, housing, transportation, and energy, or that foster co-location and enhance community life. Such an enterprise would be charged with assessing social, economic and environmental returns on investment and ensuring political neutrality, accountability and transparency. Importantly, it would also focus on regulatory coordination and on interagency and cross-sector collaboration, and it would mandate speed, quality and other performance criteria. Lastly, it could promote alternative infrastructural delivery models, with design and construction procurements and contracts that reward innovative, cooperative accomplishments.

This proposal is certainly intriguing, and one which mammoth would like to see fleshed out and discussed further, particularly in a policy context.  (We have little doubt that a majority of architects and landscape architects would support a program of experimental infrastructures, but it would need to be shown that the idea makes sense in the ways that Brown describes, not just as an employment program for out-of-work designers.  Perhaps Brown has already done this elsewhere?  The piece on Places is too short to do it.)

The primary substance of the piece, though, is the second component, which is, as the title of the article promises, a list of design principles.  Brown provides four: infrastructures should be “multipurpose, interconnected and synergistic”, “captur[ing] efficiencies by integrating diverse functions”; they should be modeled on and incorporated into natural processes; they should couple (to borrow a term from Lateral Office) their ostensible functions with additional programming which serves the needs of the communities that they are built within; and they should be resilient, particularly in the context of instability produced by climate change.

While the principles feel to some degree underdeveloped — why, for instance, think about instability only within the context of climate change, when an increasing awareness of the presence of uncertainty in all complex systems is a recurrent theme in both contemporary urban and contemporary architectural thought — this is probably as much a function of brevity as anything else.  Each of them feels, at a minimum, potentially useful, and we suspect that a program of infrastructural construction centered around them would be a vast improvement over our current national infrastructure [1].

What seems missing to us, though — and critical to understanding the peculiar value that infrastructures have as objects of design — is a discussion of infrastructure as a point of agency for designers operating in urban systems.  How can infrastructure, in other words, be used to organize urban systems?

Here, it’s useful to step away from infrastructure for a minute, and think about the arguments that landscape urbanists — particularly James Corner and Charles Waldheim — made in the seminal text of landscape urbanism, The Landscape Urbanism Reader.  There (and elsewhere), Corner and Waldheim describe and define landscape urbanism as a design movement which is specifically constructed in reaction to the failures of traditional modernist planning.  Though the various essays in that text name multiple points of failure, notably including a split between art and instrumentality in landscape design practice and the construction of binary oppositions, particularly between culture and nature, the most important of them for our discussion is modernism’s object fixation, which manifests in architectural and planning practices as a tendency to view cities as collections of static objects and to use static tools — ranging from McHargian environmental preservation, to traditional zoning, or even to New Urbanism’s form-based codes — as the primary tools for ordering cities.  (Of course, object fixation has persisted in architecture and landscape architecture long past the expiration of modernism as a coherent consensus within design.)

The landscape urbanists argue that these tools are inherently flawed, that methodologies which seek impose control on urban systems are fundamentally ill-suited to operation in the contemporary city.  While this point could be overstated — clearly, zoning, for instance, is an effectual tool for ordering cities, though it often produces massive unintended consequences — we agree that more and better tools are needed, particularly those that are effective in indeterminate, fluctuating conditions.

This is where infrastructure seems peculiarly useful to us.  In Stan Allen’s monograph/manifesto Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City, Allen describes infrastructures as elements in urban systems which, “although static in and of themselves… organize and manage complex systems of flow, movement, and exchange.  Not only do they provide a network of pathways, they also work through systems of locks, gates, and valves — a series of checks that control and regulate flow.” The potential of infrastructure, Allen argues — and we agree — resides in its ability to be at once “precise and indeterminate”, to specify both “what must be fixed and what is subject to change” [2].

In other words, an infrastructure can be a stable element which molds and manipulates the various flowing processes of urbanization which produce cities: economic exchange, human migration, traffic patterns, informational flows, legal conditions, political actions, hydrologies, waste streams, commutes, even wildlife ecologies. Both governments and private developers have historically sought to harness this potential, whether by profiting from the sale of land along new infrastructures or by reinforcing growth and density in a locale by supplementing existing infrastructures.

This capacity of infrastructure, distinct from its capacity to carry the flows that it is specifically intended for (such as electricity in the case of power lines, or traffic in the case of highways), might be termed generative.  Generative capacity, then, is the effect on an infrastructure on the territory in which it resides [3].  The American interstate highway system, for instance, was built because it had the capacity to enable people and goods to move rapidly and with great independence.  Beyond that specifically intended effect, though, it also served to produce a novel and ubiquitous form of horizontally-distributed urbanism, as first services stations and stores and later entire towns clustered around on and off-ramps [4]. No one had to plan this new urbanism; it emerged from a confluence of economic and spatial incentives, binding together on an infrastructural framework in built form.

Understanding and appropriately wielding this generative capacity is, we believe, the single most important task for architects and landscape architects to undertake if they want to participate in the design of a new generation of American infrastructures, because it promises an alternative instrument for guiding the growth of cities, one which combines the unified vision of top-down planning with the vibrancy and resilience of emergent growth.

mammoth: For readers who are not familiar with the larger body of your work, we thought we might begin by situating The Infrastructural City within that broader context. Besides editing The Infrastructural City, you’ve also edited two other books (Networked Publics and The Phillip Johnson Tapes), co-authored Blue Mondays with AUDC co-founder Robert Sumrell, and are writing another book, Life after Networks: A Critical History of Network Culture. Our understanding is that you are trained and typically describe yourself as an architectural historian, not an architect, though of course you have taught architecture at schools on both American coasts, as well as overseas. How do the “networked ecologies” that The Infrastructural City describes relate to this larger body of work — particularly your investigations of “network culture” and your training as a historian?

Varnelis: I did receive my primary training as a historian of architecture. Now that training took place within Cornell’s architecture department , as opposed to, say an art history program and I took studio—the sort of ultra-disciplinary, purely formal “Cornell and Cooper” studio that is virtually extinct these days—and worked in an office for a time. But it’s an important distinction to draw. More than virtually any other field, architects generally insist that only individuals trained (or even licensed) as architects are qualified to speak about it. This is endemic to the discipline and detrimental to it. Manfredo Tafuri would say that it forces every argument to be operative; another term for this would be instrumental. If a text doesn’t end with an uplifting little section on how architects can use it in their work, it’s not only damaged, its potentially damaging. That’s a common perception and it is a bad thing for criticism since it reduces it to a subservient role; it’s a bad thing for architects since it suggests that they couldn’t possibly be intelligent enough to think for themselves; finally, it’s a bad thing for architecture since it prevents its deepest assumptions from being called into question.

Some people have expressed confusion about what we were out to do since they wanted it to be a ringing endorsement of a direction. They wanted to see OMA-designed windmills and so on. That would have been a very different project and a very predictable one as well. But that was a misunderstanding. Our intent was to produce a book that would redefine how we understand cities, infrastructure, and Los Angeles. I wanted the book to be relevant decades later, the way that Banham’s Los Angeles: Architecture of Four Ecologies was (although by now, I’m afraid, it’s long since worn out its utility). Superficial readings that aim for endorsements of design decisions won’t work. One has to dig deeper to understand what our point is. Older forms of infrastructure are history: we say that on the back cover. We’re in a different condition in this country: you can tilt at designer windmills all you want, but unless things change radically at a sociopolitical level, they aren’t going to get built. Our current administration is more interested in supporting the ethereal structures of financialization than any sort of building. Let’s get that clear. Republicans will do even worse, unless perhaps, you are a fan of military technology. Either way, the cards are stacked against us. Under the boom, things looked mildly better in Europe, but the EU is unlikely to leave the recession behind anytime soon. The Infrastructural City might be a good guide to the near future of architecture there as well, even if we didn’t anticipate it would be. And please, let’s not chase the dream to China:  demographics are stacked against the Chinese. A decade of growth and they’ll in the same situation as we are, only without any kind of social safety net.

As far as how this book fits into my current work, I have always been much more interested in big picture investigations—the scale of the Annales school or of thinkers like McLuhan, Jameson, and Baudrillard—than in microhistories. Even my dissertation was an affront to accepted notions of what a Ph.D. in the history of architecture should be: I set out to investigate how architecture turned to a spectacularized design methodology in the postwar era (most notably that very “Cornell and Cooper” education that I was taught) and how that synced up with a general aestheticization of politics in the field. When I was doing this kind of work everyone else was focusing on the small scale, on miniaturesque accounts of noble architects toiling somewhere in obscurity.

With regard to the Johnson Tapes, he was a key player in this moment and I’m still fascinated by the postwar era. Modernism had lost its ideological impetus but continued on in its own way, zombie-like, unable to cope with the consequences of an increasingly complex, technological society. When Joan Ockman approached me about editing the Johnson Tapes for the Buell Center, of course I was glad to do it. Columbia’s been great to me and this was an opportunity to do something very direct for the school while also reviving my work on Johnson and late modernism. I think that a critical book on Johnson is necessary: Schulze’s bio is hardly that. And the field of late modernism is still wide open: I’ll be working on Kevin Roche later this year and that will give me the opportunity to revisit that work as well.

For the last decade, I’ve been interested in how cities, society, and culture are transforming at this very moment. It’s not just a matter of how network technology drives forms of inhabitation, it’s how society is changing, partly in response to new technologies  but also actively shaping those technologies in specific ways. With Robert Sumrell, I began exploring these questions both through conceptual design and through theory. AUDC continues to go strong and you’ll see work from us from time to time.

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with the Networked Publics team during a year-long residency at the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC and, after I came to Columbia, we shaped that material into a book for Doug Sery at MIT Press. We’ve continued asking the question of how the public is changing throughout the spring of this year and are collaborating with Domus and with Joseph Grima on new projects related to the topic throughout the summer and fall.

My big project currently is a book on network culture. This is a theoretical reflection on our own time as an era distinct from postmodernism. I mean, surely we can’t operate with the idea that, a generation after it first came together, postmodernism is still a current theoretical model. The role of technology in everyday life is completely different, for example. It’s become a new dominant, a kind of horizon for our culture that it most emphatically was not back in those days. Meanwhile, financialization has risen to new heights and manufacturing has all but expired in the developed world. I’ve published stretches of the book already and am aiming to have a draft on my Web site by the end of the year. It’s a huge undertaking—and a shifting one—but it’s crucial to leaving behind the notion that analysis has nothing to teach us anymore. Instead of bemoaning our economic condition, let’s celebrate the fact that the unreflective scramble for shoddy work is over.

Let’s start thinking again.

mammoth: It seems to us that The Infrastructural City essentially does two things. First, it is aimed at a better understanding of the infrastructural city. We might call this mapping (in a more generalized sense that the mere production of graphical representations of urban conditions), you refer to “redefin[ing] how we understand” cities. That task clearly constitutes the bulk of the text. Second, it is also, at least occasionally, concerned with the question of how urbanists can operate — can pursue desirable change — in the infrastructural city. As it develops an understanding of the infrastructural city, it shows why the traditional tools of the urbanist (first and foremost, the plan) have become increasingly ineffectual, and argues that we need, in response, to develop new tools. Later, we’d like to return to this second concern, to suggestions about what might replace those traditional tools, because we think The Infrastructural City contains some valuable hints about those tools — such as your discussion of a “command line” architecture in “Invisible City”, or Roger Sherman’s argument for an architecture that interacts directly with property, risk, and the informal transactions that produce the form of the city. First, though, a question that relates to the task of understanding the infrastructural city, as well as the “different conditions” you allude to.

In the two years since the publication of The Infrastructural City, we’ve seen several major social and political events that are affecting the city and its infrastructures. First and foremost amongst these is the global economic decline. Prognostications for the future of that decline vary wildly, but it is indisputable that the bubble conditions in which the latest layer of growth in the infrastructural city was laid down — the cell networks, the vast ex-urban speculations, the “return-to-the-city” condominiums — have ended, and been replaced by economic uncertainty. (Though we doubt anyone would accuse you of having failed to anticipate this decline, it is one thing to anticipate it, and perhaps another to watch it play out.) One might also add to this the major political swing that you’ve just noted, from Bush to Obama, which corresponded to a fairly broad hope (amongst urbanists, at least) that infrastructure would have its day in the sun of federal funding, and the disillusionment that has followed as what infrastructural funding has been forthcoming has been largely concentrated on (admittedly needed) road repairs and (unnecessary) rural highway expansions, both prized for their ‘shovel-ready’ quality. Meanwhile, technological changes — and corresponding societal shifts in the use of technology — have continued. As Lane Barden anticipates in the text, the Nokia phone featured on an ad cascading down the side of an office tower in one of his photographs now looks virtually antiquarian, so distant is it in form and function from the smart phones which increasingly dominate the cellular market. And their adoption is not strictly limited to the wealthier technophiles one might expect. The Census Bureau, for instance, recently found that one of the most effective ways to reach impoverished Hispanic neighborhoods in Los Angeles is through downloadable apps and content.

Given these events, it seems quite possible to us that your reading of the infrastructural city has shifted in those two years. Is that true? How might you map the infrastructural city differently today? One way to think about this might be: is there a chapter that you would include in a 2011 edition of The Infrastructural City that you didn’t include in 2008?

Varnelis: I’ve thought a lot about what the new chapter would be. I think that the book holds out a bit more hope than the current situation really warrants and I needed to be more precise about the problems we face.

So many people today hold out this idea that technology is our horizon: anything that goes wrong, it seems, technology can fix. Design, in this sense, is technology’s right-hand. All of the pseudo-academics and critics who praised the “creative city” and the Bilbao-effect suggest that design can get us past any problems. Is your city a post-apocalyptic rust belt? Well, some clever design, say via a Muji Store and a couple of design museums, will solve the problems. Or heck, embrace the favela chic and just re-brand it as the Rome of the Rust Belt.

A new chapter would analyze how we got where we are and the impossibility of achieving the kind of change that we need through design. Specifically, this chapter would be on how the problems of complexity, over-accumulation, and diminishing returns in our society block the older idea of infrastructure as a form of commons.

There’s little question that over-accumulation produced both the boom and the crash (just why this is a mystery to so many economists is beyond me). We’ve seen, to put it in the simple terms that This American Life used, the growth of a giant pool of money that business has accumulated since the start of capitalism. It took centuries for the well-off and even relatively well-off to accumulate $35 trillion of investment money worldwide, but in the six years between 2000 and 2006 that giant pool of money doubled. All of these investors with all of this money wanted high returns; they looked at the performance of market indices like the Dow and saw unprecedented rates of profit (in the case of the Dow from 891 in 1980 to over 11,000 in 2000), considerably more than the historical rate of return from manufacturing (which historically speaking has been roughly 8%). After all, many of them had accumulated their money that way so why not expect the good times to continue? And of course rates of taxation that also were historically low helped all of this. The theory went that as long as tax rates were low, the economy would boom and the resulting growth would generate even more revenues than if taxes were at a higher, sustainable level. This was a great idea except that it was a little akin to taking speed to get you through a project: surely if it improves your stamina tenfold, it’s got to be good for you, right? Well, eventually your teeth will fall out, but if you keep at it you can always get out, right? Collectively, investors in the developed countries ceased investing in production and instead turned more and more to complex financial instruments that could produce high rates of return, even if these were based on  bubble economics. Manufacturing’s been gutted in places like the US or the UK. In our case, in 1980 manufacturing was about 25% of the GDP while financial services were about 12%. By the end of the bubble in 2006, manufacturing was down to 12% while finance had soared to over 20%. I hate to say that things have gotten worse since, but they have.

Again as far as “solutions” go, the case of China is a special one: capitalists are investing in an area with tremendous inequalities and inefficiencies and able to reap huge rewards from low wages and massive productivity gains. That’s how you can make good money on a $40 DVD player that cost a dollar or two to produce. But that won’t last forever.

And then there’s housing. Architects were eager to participate in that boom and it was quite stomach-turning to see them plunge headlong into a mad system. And housing did well, for a time, returning the necessary rates of investment, but again, it was based on something from nothing. Even now, in so many places—including the countries that I know well, the US, UK, Lithuania and Ireland—the bubble still has some 20 to 40% to fall to return to reasonable rates based on long-established historical relationships of what kind of real estate wages can support. Architecture became virtual in the last decade, but it did so in “luxury” housing, not in cyberspace. Moreover, just how economies that have no more real industrial base are supposed to produce the wages to pay for this inflated real estate is beyond me.

I mentioned it in my introduction to the book, but now I’d be more emphatic about the role of neoliberal economy policy in all this. Low taxes means little investment in infrastructure. Railroads are literally falling apart. Gutted by underinvestment, average train speeds have been declining for years. Refineries and the electric grid are stressed to a breaking point as deregulated industry avoids tying up capital in rapidly-depreciating physical things whenever possible. So it’s no surprise that, when Obama picked Larry Summers to come up with an economic policy for him, the former Harvard President who once said that women weren’t smart enough to be scientists or engineers chose bailing out financial services and handing out stimulus checks to consumers instead of investing in infrastructure.

That’s the reality we’re up against and the Zaha Hadid-designed windmills that critics are upset with me for not going ga-ga over are little more than Potemkin Villages masking a world continually collapsing.

The economy is infrastructure. I should have been more clear about that.

I also think it would have been helpful to talk about complexity in the way that Joseph Tainter discusses it, yoking it to the framework that I’ve developed above. We’ve become so incredibly adept at routing around our problems that a topological map of our world—if it were possible—would be something like a map of the infrastructure in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. So to keep this increasingly convoluted and highly bureaucratized system going, we have produced intense levels of complexity that require greater and greater amounts of energy to keep going. This energy is quite literal and we’re seeing diminishing marginal returns on energy invested even as peak oil looms (and of course oil is our major source of energy). At a certain point, the system becomes unsustainable and the result is collapse, which Tainter defines as a greatly diminished level of complexity. Tainter suggests that the way out is innovation, by which he means technological innovation although I think that the financial innovations that I described earlier are similar. The problem is that these systems are unsustainable in a fundamental deep way. The Infrastructural City isn’t just a condition, it’s a bellwether for a long-term culture of crisis.

In that light, although I’m tremendously sympathetic to projects like Roger Sherman’s game theory urbanism as a way of operating within such highly complex environments, the lack of a larger approach within the book suggests the lack of a larger solution within design per se. Rick Miller and Ted Kane’s piece is brilliant in its unpacking of the problems that “light,” privatized infrastructure produce in cities. It’s not so much a question of AT&T not extending its coverage enough, it’s a question of how mobile phone companies lead cities to conceive of themselves as entrepreneurs. That’s not an appropriate role for cities: what happened to ideas of the Commons? That’s a failure point for the imagination and redevelopment of infrastructure today. Other pieces are like Calvino stories, unmasking the unsustainability that underlies the infrastructural city: a town that excavates itself turning into a series of giant holes, a river that will disappear if its restored to its natural state, the re-watering of a desert lake, and so on. The book’s value in my mind—and what I am trying to do through my current writing—is to make people go out and uncover the deep madness underlying our society. People talk about the irrelevance of academics. Maybe that’s because we got too busy talking about obscure theory and weren’t willing to focus on the deeper issues that, frankly, it was our duty to take on.

mammoth: How peculiarly American are these problems? While financial upheaval is clearly a globalized and interconnected phenomenon, one gets the impression that, as a political and cultural matter, the “idea of the Commons” remains relatively healthy in, say, continental western Europe. And that perhaps corresponding advantages accrue to design culture: there is a greater quantity (and quality) of public work to be done, critical infrastructures are more likely to be designed by public teams which include architects and landscape architects (rather than by private corporations). There, the odd, ad-hoc semi-publics that control American local, urban politics — NIMBYist neighborhood associations, our individualist distrust of the very idea of expertise, etc. — do not appear to have such a stranglehold on planning processes. Or, for that matter, even with all the governmental dysfunction and systemic poverty, the situation seems less deadlocked in South America, where young designers are thriving, backed by governments, institutions, and individual leaders who are arguing for the importance of a commons, and, critically, backing that argument up with targeted spending. We’re thinking, for instance, of the celebrated case of Medellin, where architecture has been treated as social and economic infrastructure.

Varnelis: These problems aren’t just American. We’re dealing with global problems endemic to an aging capitalism. The idea of the commons is certainly more popular on the continent, but if you listen to the response to the economic crisis there, it’s that this is the end of the European welfare state. In other words, the crisis will make Europe is going to be more like the US/UK/Ireland, not less. I hate to say anything bad about the unions in a country where unions are all but dead, but unions were part of the problem in the US and are a bigger part of the problem in Europe. Rather than working to build a more just system across the board, unions have instead turned to protecting entrenched membership. This is a major problem in America, whether it be the collapse of NASA or the collapse of cities and its increasingly the problem in Europe too. Watch for a European PATCO crisis soon. Don’t expect much building anytime soon, unless it’s done with funny money.

Now when we look at Medellin, certainly there’s a lot to applaud. But you’re also looking at a condition where capital has moved to a place that has been underproductive for too long. There’s no question that it’s easier to do more in places that are growing.

mammoth: You mention that the loss of the “idea of the Commons [is] a failure point for the imagination and redevelopment of infrastructure today.” But here in America, has there ever been a strong culture of the idea of the Commons guiding the development of infrastructure? Certainly, there have been select examples — Eisenhower’s freeways — but many of the infrastructures that have been most influential in the development of our cities, such as Los Angeles’ own streetcar networks and New York City’s subway, were privately funded and planned. Should architects be working to reclaim (or construct) the idea of the commons? Or do we — architects, landscape architects, designers, urbanists, who all presumably hold out some hope of remaining relevant to the future of the American city — need to find ways, like Sherman’s approach, to design around the absence of the commons? Or perhaps this pair of questions sets up a false dichotomy, and the way to continue working while not ignoring the “deeper issues” is to hold seemingly Sisyphean tasks like reclaiming the idea of the commons in tension with flexible and approaches which are aimed at small, tactical acts of productive architecture?

Varnelis: Let’s be careful about one thing: neoliberalism—coupled with Ameriphobia overseas—has been highly effective at depicting this idea of the US as having always been the same. There’s been a radical rewriting of history to make it seem like the frontier myth is all there is. There’s always been a back and forth and many of those infrastructures were turned public rather rapidly only to see much greater success. Often, of course this has been in service of real estate, as the case of the LADWP  shows too clearly.

As far as design: I agree with you. Architects have been too enthralled by neoliberalism for too long, e.g. public/private partnerships (don’t even get me started: bad loans for bad private projects are a major source of fiscal crisis in cities today), the market, etc. We need to advocated for policy change, toward greater shared resources. I think it’s obvious to anyone that the current political and economic system is massively dysfunctional and will come to an end. Just when, none of us know. Will it be replaced by a happy form of fascism? Just possibly. Architects need to advocate for positive political change, but as they do so, they’re going to need to find a way to make do and, in general, it is going to be tactics like Roger’s that are going to make a difference on an individual level.

mammoth: A consistent argument mammoth makes is that the value of architecture and architects lies in much more than just the design of buildings. Which is not at all to say that we find buildings uninteresting or unimportant, but rather that architecture as a discipline ought to think of itself more as a way of thinking than as a discipline that — like, say, structural engineering — is primarily concerned with developing a unique kind of technical expertise and defending that ‘turf’ from the encroachment of other disciplines.

You make a similar comment in a recent interview published in Triple Canopy, saying that “architecture doesn’t teach you how to regurgitate knowledge, rather it teaches you how to deal with problems. Architecture has always been about much more than just building buildings”.

This is a particularly relevant position, we think, in a climate where “building buildings” is, as you note, something we should expect to see relatively much less of. (Kenneth Frampton, writing in Steven Holl’s new monograph Urbanisms, notes that Holl literally had to go to China to find the regulatory and financial freedom to build the sort of “megaforms” that he had been drawing. Setting aside whether those buildings are necessary or not, it seems an instructive lesson in the difficulty of realizing what might traditionally be considered ‘significant’ architecture.)

Do you think, though, that architecture schools are really producing architects who are prepared to be thinkers rather than technicians?

Varnelis: Absolutely. The longstanding recession that started in the early 1970s and lasted until the mid-1990s led many architects to investigate radically different methods of production. Unfortunately, the building boom led the field astray, back into a disciplinarity of the most conservative kind just at the same time as it egged them on to build pretty much the worst buildings since the mid-nineteenth century. It was a colossal failure of a decade, a model of everything we shouldn’t have done. “Make it new!” So few of us were asking why, why should we make it new? Even fewer were asking why make it at all. Education, which could have paved the way for a new century of architecture, has been devastated. Most schools have either retrenched into a nostalgia for the hand or a fetish for parametric fantasies. Doesn’t anybody think about how these people will be employed?

But this is the reason that I’m at Columbia. Dean Wigley set out to create what he calls the “expanded architect,” building a school in which you get an architectural education, but you also employ the methods you learn in nontraditional venues. It’s a big enough school to easily accommodate such efforts.  The sort of work that the Spatial Information Design Lab, or C-Lab, or the Netlab is doing is, generally speaking, unlike what’s produced in architecture schools or in the typical office, but it’s essential for pushing the boundaries in the field. I’m optimistic that other schools will follow our lead to do the same in the future. Imagine what sort of students you might produce if a school decided it wasn’t necessary to deal with the accreditors anymore. People have been asking why teach history and theory. Well, why teach structures or professional practice? Maybe not everyone needs these classes. I think it’s a radical experiment that’s well worth pushing.

As we have nearly reached the conclusion of our collaborative reading of The Infrastructural City, we thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the lessons of the text with one of mammoth‘s favorite architectural studios, the Toronto-based Lateral Office. In a series of emails, mammoth spoke with Lateral’s Lola Sheppard and Mason White about why the Economist is more essential reading for architects than Wallpaper, what an “expanded field” for architecture might look like, how to evaluate the performance of a speculative proposal, and, of course, The Infrastructural City.

Readers of mammoth are likely also familiar with Lola and Mason as two of the founders of research-group-slash-blog InfraNet Lab; in addition to Lateral and InfraNet, Lola teaches at the University of Waterloo and Mason at the University of Toronto.  The awards that Lateral have received include Canada’s Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture, selection for Pamphlet Architecture 30, finalists in the WPA 2.0 competition, the Young Architects Award from the Architecture League of New York, and the Lefevre Fellowship for Emerging Practitioners from Ohio State University.

[A.I.R. Unit; Lateral Office with artist Sara Graham]

mammoth: The reason that we thought an interview with Lateral might be particularly appropriate at this time is the overlap between the text that we’ve been reading and discussing this summer — The Infrastructural City — and your work, which has largely been about imagining new typologies for and relationships to infrastructures. Even those projects, like the A.I.R. Unit, which concern more traditional architectural programs like spaces for dwelling show a clearly infrastructural way of thinking about architecture. How did you become interested in infrastructure?

Sheppard: I’m not sure that, initially, we would have identified our work specifically as being about infrastructure as a category.  But we would say that we began, even when dealing with single building or public space, with a desire to unpack the systems which underlie a given site or condition.  I’d say we were more interested in format than form.  There were two early projects which probably changed the way we thought.  One was a competition for a dock in Memphis, TN, where we looked at harnessing changing water levels and seasonal flooding to drive the project — and produce sounds. And the second was a research project from 2003, entitled “Flatspace”, which we pursued as Lefevre Fellows at Ohio State University. We were researching the reformatting of expansive retail corridors and ended up generating nine proposals, three driven by program, three by  landscape and three by mobility networks. That project sowed the seeds for the strategies and approaches in our later work.

I think also that we have always been interested in rethinking the overlooked parts of our built environment — and much of what organizes these environments seems to fall under the category of logistics and infrastructure.

White: Those early projects, though naive and more searching than strategic, were foundational to our approach to current work. And I really only wanted to add that, regardless of the term infrastructure, we are seeking the limits of an extrinsic architecture, and this often circumstantially addresses infrastructure(s).

[Models from Flatspace; Lateral Office]

mammoth: We’re glad you brought up “Flatspace”, as it has been on our minds this week — the chapter of The Infrastructural City we read this week deals with the same exurban landscapes of distribution and consumption as “Flatspace”. (It also happens to be how we first learned of Lateral, after it was published in 30 60 90.) We’ll return to it shortly.

But, first: what is ‘an extrinsic architecture’?

White: This is something we are asking ourselves as well. We are finding it to be an architecture that is very aware of its external influence, and maybe more importantly, any opportunities afforded by that awareness. Really, with our work we are seeking an understanding and incorporation of the ever-ricocheting effects and potentials of a work of architecture. Asking ourselves: how deep into its region or environment does a project reach? And quite often, this has taken us out of architecture, and into economics, ecology, energy, and others.

mammoth: An interesting question this raises is the issue of expertise: obviously, as architects, we are not specialists in economics, ecology, energy, and so on. What about being an architect enables us to make useful decisions about the interactions between architecture and these other fields? More specifically, how has Lateral approached investigation into territories — like, say, the logistics of big-box operations you investigated in Flatspace — where you do not have specific expertise?

Sheppard: It’s a good question, and one I’d say we grapple with often.  We increasingly begin projects with broad and open initial research, to get a sense of the range of issues. For instance in the Flatspace research, we looked at a whole host of issues – the role of GIS, aerial photography, site targeting and the entire militarization of site identification, the notion of ‘branding the land’, the role of zoning regulations, the construction of big boxes…

In this scenario, armed with at least initial knowledge, I think the role of the architect is to read the opportunities. Specialist will have deeper but narrower readings of a specific site or context. As in tunnel vision – it can be sharp but narrow, potentially overlooking issues that aren’t categorizable. I think we try to have 270 degree vision. The architect in this scenario is not simply problem solver, but cultural, environmental and spatial detective, bringing to light the forces (geographic, economic, and cultural) at work within a given geography, and able to look for synergies between issues and opportunities.

[Flatspace; Lateral Office; "the expanded field of retail corridors"]

White: The specialization issue is a prickly one – but I think worthwhile to expand upon a bit. And here I am always reminded of the fox versus hedgehog debate that Isaiah Berlin illuminated. (The fox being an expert generalist, and the hedgehog being an expert specialist.) I think this debate is also one that made us more sheepish about our work in the beginning – thinking that it was not a methodology we should be pursuing for the very reasons you just mentioned, and that we should specialize in something overtly architectural–forms, materials, fabrication. But over time, our position has solidified more as a specialization on phenomenon and opportunities that is between categories and disciplines. For example, I still think the most important magazine to subscribe to as an architect is the Economist, not Wallpaper. Reading the Economist as an architect, you can see things before they become relevant in architecture, with Wallpaper or Dwell you are seeing it after the fact, as a trend.

Really we are most interested in questions of architectural typology and spatial format, and these are often promiscuous interrogations.

mammoth: It’s interesting that you say that, at the outset of your work, you thought you “should specialize in something overtly architectural”, but you’ve since been pulled towards more “promiscuous” work. Was there a particular moment — or project, or set of projects — that produced this shift?

White: It is hard to say that there was a specific moment, but probably some combination of the Flatspace research project at Ohio State University as Lefevre Fellows and a general skepticism of our own professional experiences, as well as the education that brought us to that. More optimistically, it was likely a reaction to a broader position and potential for architecture that lay latent in early work and approaches as students. But, probably hard to identify a particular moment. From early on, we were very influenced by the work and thinking of Keller Easterling, Bucky Fuller, Cedric Price, Constantinos Doxiadis, and others, such as Georges Perec, Paul Virilio, and Luis Fernández-Galiano.

[Farming Salton; Lateral Office for cityLAB's WPA2.0 competition.]

mammoth: The very first chapter in The Infrastructural City, Barry Lehrman’s “Reconstructing the Void”, is about Owens Lake, which is an extraordinary post-infrastructural, post-natural landscape north-east of Los Angeles. South-east of Los Angeles, of course, there is a larger and more famous, but similarly post-natural body of water, the Salton Sea. Your entry to the 2009 WPA2.0 competition, “Farming Salton,” takes the devastated condition of the Salton Sea as an opportunity, proposing a series of new infrastructures to be overlaid onto the Salton Sea and surrounds, with the aim of generating new sustainable ecologies, new economic generators, and new recreational opportunities.

One of the things that you suggest in the project is that these new infrastructures should be “coupled” — that “multiple processes [should be bundled] with spatial experiences”.  (Given that “Coupling” is also the title of PA30, it seems fair to say that this is a common theme in your projects.) Why is this important?

Sheppard: We’ve been huge fans of The Infrastructural City because it has served as an original medium for outlining the scope and potential of readings of infrastructure.

The question of ‘coupling’ is interesting to us, because if you look at the history of most infrastructure, it has tended to be mono-functional. It typically consists of engineering projects designed to address a single problem.  We’ve recently been talking about “landscapes on life-support,” where infrastructure, in the current condition, serves to simply maintain a failing ecological state.  (Owens Lake is such an example, where the state of California spends upward of $415 million on the Dust Mitigation Project simply to prevent toxic dust from spreading.)  In projects such as Salton or Icelink, we ask: can infrastructure be more pro-active or more catalytic? Can it serve to support other conditions — ecologies, economies, and public realms?

Our interest in infrastructure really began with an interest in expanding the scope and territory of architecture’s realm beyond the singular building, to include more mutable or contingent conditions. We wanted to embrace questions of economy, logistics, ecology, etc. Infrastructure emerged as a basic precondition for all these questions. Alone, it remains a purely logistical operation. However, in coupling or bundling multiple functions that operate like epiphytes, an expanded territory of intervention emerges. An architecture which responds to opportunities of contingency manifests itself in atypical spatial formats. In a sense, what we’re exploring are these new formats for architecture ‘in an expanded field’.

(We are hosting a topic session at the 99th ACSA Annual Conference next March in Montreal, entitled Architecture’s Expanded Territories, on many of these questions.)

[Icelink; Lateral Office]

mammoth: One theme that recurs frequently in The Infrastructural City is a certain pessimism about new infrastructures on the scale of California’s aqueducts or Los Angeles’ freeways. The primary factors that are pinpointed in being responsible for this are not a lack of architectural interest but deep structural issues: both economic — the current global malaise — and political — a combination of NIMBYism with legal gridlock. This might be described, broadly, as a crisis of “traditional infrastructure”.

Do you share this skepticism about the future of traditional infrastructures in North America? It seems to us that some of your recent work — thinking in particular of Farming Salton, but perhaps also the Emergent North research — could be partially construed (though you may disagree) as a response to this problem, in so far as it is an attempt to describe alternatives to “traditional infrastructure”, where infrastructure might retain its capacity to generate and guide the growth of human settlement patterns, but also become more flexible, more distributed, less mono-functional.

White: We certainly share that pessimism, and much of this came up in a panel session with Kazys earlier this summer as part of the series of discussions on “networked publics.” The discussion led to several questions that we are often preoccupied with: what scale(s) does infrastructure operate at, what does infrastructure respond to, and what form might it take? And we are quite partial to the position of infrastructure as soft, scalable, and market-responsive. And, yes, that is a critique of “traditional infrastructure,” which is hard, big, and a product of its market-time.

Infrastructure should also be entrepreneurial — something that both the Salton Sea project demonstrates and our ongoing work in the Canadian Arctic will seek. The combination of public and private investment is an emerging market (of which the PPIAF is an interesting real-world precedent). But we also share a degree of skepticism about infrastructure as a catch-all realm of practice. The term has increasingly expanded to stand-in for any architecture serving as a process or a system — and this mirrors the post-economic collapse return to function after the heady days of exuberant cultural projects. The attention that infrastructure is getting is further evidence of a shift to processes over objects. Though maybe what we are seeing and how we are positioning our work, is not an abandonment of architecture or a naive fascination with infrastructure so much as a renewed interest in an emergent territory of practice that is between these. We are finding that many of the questions that architecture could be asking are being picked up by others. Architecture is slow.

Through the research at InfraNet Lab, with colleagues Maya Przybylski and Neeraj Bhatia, we are trying to position and qualify our understanding and forecasting of architecture’s potential as influenced by and integrated with infrastructure. Maya brings an interest in computational infrastructure, and Neeraj an interest in social infrastructure. The Lab gives us a space to intersect these interests. Much of this position will be evident in Pamphlet Architecture #30 and the first issue of our collaborative journal with Archinect called Bracket.

We were asked recently if we were a “trans-disciplinary practice,” and although it would be convenient to say yes–and likely with much evidence in the work–I think our preferred answer is that we are anti-disciplinary … or maybe un-disciplinary. The only time I would say being undisciplined is intentional and productive.

mammoth: This contention that “infrastructure should be entrepreneurial” is intriguing — both in and of itself, and also because arguments for a renewed commitment to infrastructure (whether general, like Krugman’s recent op-ed in the New York Times, or specifically architectural, like Nancy Levinson’s editorial piece for Places) so often are explicitly arguments for public work over and against private work.

That said, it’s an assertion that we are broadly in agreement with.

Part of the in-and-of-itself interest is that ‘entrepreneurial’ implies an evaluation of performance — process, not just object, as you noted. This is true of much infrastructural design generally: you need to be able to simulate performance (of economies, or hydrologies, or traffic flows, or structure), and simulating performance is a much bigger component of the design process that it would be for a more ‘typical’ architectural project (like a house).

So maybe the interesting question that arises then is — particularly in a research-oriented context like your work on Salton or the Canadian Arctic — how do we test the validity of the entrepreneurial qualities of our proposals? Do you have a particular example of how the development of entrepreneurial qualities (or some other objective tangentially related to a project’s explicit function or performance) fed back into the design process as a whole in a given project?

Sheppard: It’s interesting — this question of how does one evaluate performance. In most cases the economic and ecologic proposals we are leveraging are common, even proven models, such as job creation or remediation. Maybe what makes them unique for us is that they can be positioned in tandem rather than as oppositions.

Large infrastructure projects, such as those of the WPA 1.0, created jobs during their construction that ceased once the projects were built. (Although one could argue that long-term benefits were skills training, and the creation of large arts and literacy projects.) The TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) is perhaps the more interesting model. It too was a major employer during the depression, on the construction phase of projects. However, it continues its relevance today through economic development, job creation, education, and research. Rather than simply providing an energy resource, its role is more diverse, tentacular and long-term.

In the example of the Salton Sea, there are existing (engineered) proposals that are coming with price tags of over $8.9 billion, with an additional $140 million each year. And this is largely to maintain a status quo, and prevent further decline. Something is going to be built there, and the question is what does the public get in return for that bill? In our proposal for a project that could be built incrementally, the intention is to engage a different thinking about investment. But more importantly, the project seeks to generate ongoing economic benefits, through new industries that might dovetail into the infrastructure, and through restored ecologies that in turn reinvigorate recreation and tourism (once the lifeblood of the region). The intention is that entrepreneurial economic returns have a much longer life.

In a project such as the augmented Ice Roads (near Yellowknife, Canada), our criticism is that the engineered ice roads have a short operational season and serve one use for an average of 67 days a year. We’re asking how can one extend the operating season, stimulate the ecology (through fish hatcheries), and aggregate other programs — in this case recreational fishing and adventure camping — to generate increased returns.

In all these projects, the underlying question is how might design address the integration of these various operations.

[Project map (top) and augmented ice roads (bottom), from Emergent North; Lateral Office/InfraNet Lab]

mammoth: We very much like this idea, that explicitly describing the various tangential economic benefits of a proposed infrastructure becomes a part of the design itself — rather than, as is probably too often the case, being seen as something that is extrinsic to the work of design. A close parallel to this might be the research of Roger Sherman, whose chapter in The Infrastructural City (“Count(ing) on Change”) seeks to demonstrate that the negotiations required for the implementation of a project not only do not necessarily detract from the project, but can often be a productive enterprise leading to otherwise unforeseeable solutions. In both cases — you, integrating and aggregating programs, particularly economic; Roger Sherman, exploring the possibilities produced by processes of negotiation — something which is often thought of as prior to and even antagonistic towards the process of design is wrapped into design, enriching it.

In a recent interview at Places, the landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha were asked to describe their model of practice, which they have referred to as “activist practice”. For them, this means that, rather than pursuing clients and commissions, they have sought to do projects — often taking the form of publications and exhibitions — which question cultural understandings of landscape, which provoke questions. They break “conceptual ground”, rather than physical ground. This idea — that practicing landscape architecture or architecture means much more than just building buildings or planting landscapes, as obviously important as those things are — is not new, but it does often seem to be perennially lost in the distinction that is made between “real” and “paper” architecture.

One kind of “conceptual ground” that Lateral is explicitly engaged in breaking is this work of developing an “expanded field” for architecture, which would obviously include the sort of additions to the process of design that we’ve been discussing. But, more broadly — yet thinking specifically of things architects do — what does “practicing architecture” mean to Lateral? Since we’ve already been dancing around this question (and phrased that way, it’s perhaps a bit broad), perhaps one way to think about this might be to tell us about what you think or hope the future might hold for Lateral.

White: We are not very good at forecasting in the mirror, but I can say that the combination of writing, research and design has helped to chart our thinking within the field. As for how this might define a practice, we are willing to let this take place naturally as and when opportunities arise. But I think we are ultimately interested in reformatting an architectural practice – we aspire to the design of ideas and idea of design, though we don’t think this precludes building. However, we have turned down the model of a boutique practice in order to pursue projects in the public realm from the outset, rather than ‘graduate’ into that kind of work.

As for your comment on the expanded field, architecture will continue to oscillate between bouts of autonomy and transdiciplinarity for some time. This has been evident in the last decade or so, and we have made our allegiances to transdisciplinarity apparent. But as this debate has swung internally, there continues to be a lack of practices and design strategists that have staked a claim at the seams of where architecture meets environment. This is where we would align ourselves (and Bracket has become a useful venue for curating practices and thinkers within that position).

And just to qualify a bit, we don’t see ourselves as (nor would we want to be) economists or ecologists. We prefer being architectural strategists – only we sometimes radiate outside traditional notions of the profession to more fully understand a context or a condition. And in that process, we don’t limit ourselves to a superficial treatment of the subject.

To return back to your reading, we are certainly sympathetic to Roger Sherman’s criticism of planning’s inability to respond to certain urban change, his call for architects to assume risk, and the power of entrepreneurial local anomalies to catalyze successive development. And being sympathetic to design incorporating new models of planning, we share his claim that “design strategy operates hand-in-hand with a business plan” (from Sherman and Dana Cuff’s forthcoming Fast-Forward Urbanism). For us, this is the difference between operating tactically and operating strategically. We like chess player Savielly Tartakover’s saying that “tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.” This ‘nothing to do’ can be interpreted as either 1) seemingly nothing possible to do; or 2) seemingly nothing needed to do. Both interpretations necessitate a more expanded understanding of the brief or context that precedes architecture. We prefer working when there is nothing to do.

[Traffic cameras in Los Angeles, photographed by flickr user Puck90]

“Blocking All Lanes”, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, and Steve Rowell’s contribution to The Infrastructral City, opens by questioning the various meanings of “traffic”:

“If Los Angeles evokes sunshine, flashy cars, and movie stars, it also instantly brings to mind traffic.  But the word “traffic” is always a little slippery, one of those words that escapes us when we try to pin it down.  For engineers and the dictionary alike, “traffic” refers to the movement of vehicles along a roadway.  For the rest of us, however, traffic has come to mean the exact opposite: that phenomenon of vehicles crowding a roadway until everything slows down to a frustrating crawl…

…We are traffic… Of course, we don’t talk that way: we say that we are “in traffic”, but we never admit to being traffic… our need to remove our own culpability from congestion, our need to speak of being “stuck in a jam”, is an expression of our profound ambivalence to driving.  The automobile, the capitalist vehicle par excellence, promises freedom while the often-frustrating experience of driving leaves us feeling quite out of control.  We hold onto the idea that although we might be stuck now, there is a way out.  But what if our agency were underpinned by an organizing, computational mechanism?  We stop.  We go.  We turn.  We yield.  What if these were not simply rules to follow (code as law), but instructions to follow (code as program)…”

After detouring through a (rather fascinating) history of the evolution of traffic control (a history which reminded me of a recent tweet from the excellent Lost Angeles: “at the turn of the century, speed limits for the new cars were 8 mph in residential districts and 6 mph in business districts”), the authors turn to a discussion of the contemporary means of traffic control in Los Angeles, which they split into two categories, physical systems and virtual data.  The former are described thusly:

“…over 50,000 buried loop detectors — the insulated wire loops that passively detect subtle magnetic field changes from vehicles — combine with over 700 weatherproofed video cameras, some of which are remotely controlled to pan and zoom, to monitor and control traffic flow.  Loops automatically trigger software in switching boxes linked to intersection signals, but also send data to TMCs that allow traffic engineers to monitor flow patterns and adjust timings remotely.  A simple click of  mouse button [in the control centers "ATSAC" (Automated Traffic Control and Surveillance) and "TMC" (CALTRANS's Traffic Management Center)] can start or stop the flow of movement on the grid.”

Of course, as that description makes clear, the virtual and physical aspects of the modern traffic control apparatus are materially inseparable, as the data has neither host nor eyes without its physical appendages and the physical appendages are dead and useless unless the streams of information they host flows and is interpreted.  If there is a real distinction to be drawn between the physical and the virtual aspects of traffic control, it is, as the authors note, that the physical appendages are persistent and static, moving only when maintenance workers crack open their housings, while the data the system hosts is “ephemeral and dynamic”.

[Inductive loops in Los Angeles pavement; photograph via CLUI]

The final portion of the chapter discusses “incidents”, which are described as the re-introduction of the corporeal and embodied into the virtual system of traffic control – the smooth flow that the virtual seeks to enable is interrupted, human errors literally pile up on freeways and in the streets.  This feedback between traffic control system and human agents, though, is not at all one way.  Traffic (remember, “we are traffic”) and traffic control systems are functionally cybernetic: the driver’s foot on the gas pedal moves up and down in rhythm with the dictates of a city-spanning central nervous system, communicating as surely with the driver through the code of yellow, red, and green as the brain does with the arm.  The traffic control system is extraordinarily complex, existing as networked ecologies do, at a multiplicity of scales. At some scales, it is easily experienced directly — the traffic light — while others can only be experienced through mediating systems or summaries, such as the traffic diagrams the authors have drawn.  An inductive loop, for instance, can be understood both as a series of strangely beautiful markings in hot-poured asphalt (above) and as a single neuron in a massively complex system.  Stepping back further, that massively complex system only functions a part of the irreducibly complex urban whole: without pit mines to produce aggregate, there would be no roads for traffic to fill; or, without the individual people who commute on the roads, there would be no need to coordinate signal timings.

The interesting fact that arises from the complexity of these co-evolved systems (and, as noted in Varnelis’s introduction to The Infrastructural City, from the primacy of individual property rights in L.A.’s political culture) is that, “as the possibilities for adding new highways — or even lanes — dwindle in many cities, most new progress is made at the level of code”.  This shift which the authors identify is a part of a systemic shift in the methodology of urbanism, from plan to hack, that we’ve been fascinated with for some time now.  In a mature infrastructural ecology, like Los Angeles, the city has developed such a persistent and ossified physical form that, barring a radical shift in the city’s political culture, designing infrastructure becomes more a task of re-configuration and re-use than a task of construction.

[The interior of ATSAC, via Swindle Magazine's feature on ATSAC]

Initially, this may seem an extraordinarily frustrating condition for urbanists, who have of late been so interested in the possibility that the design of infrastructures might offer an alternative instrument for shaping cities, combining the intentionality and vision of the plan with the vibrancy and resilience characteristic of emergent growth.  Infrastructures, we’ve noticed, can be a stable element which mold and manipulate the various flowing processes of urbanization which produce cities: economic exchange, human migration, traffic patterns, informational flows, property values, hydrologies, waste streams, commutes, even wildlife ecologies.  Historically, governments and private developers have sought to harness this potential, whether by profiting from the sale of land along a new infrastructure or by supplementing existing infrastructure to reinforce growth and density in a locale (the initial growth of Los Angeles along privately-owned streetcar lines being one of the classic examples of the former sort of infrastructural generation).  But if, as the authors of “Blocking All Lanes” suggest (and, I think it is fair to say, The Infrastructural City suggests as a whole), opportunities to plan and design new infrastructural frameworks are likely to be extremely rare in mature infrastructural ecologies, should urbanists abandon their interest in infrastructure as an instrument for shaping the city?

[Signal vaults in a traffic island, via CLUI]

I don’t think so, for two primary reasons.

First, the rarity and scarcity of those opportunities does not mean that they should not be seized when they are realistically presented.  And when opportunities for the construction of new infrastructures within a mature city do occur, they are likely to appear in hack-like guises: concretely, like Atlanta’s Beltline, which utilizes a defunct rail right-of-way as the foundation for a new commuter rail line¹, or Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System, which redirects the flow of cleaned wastewater in Orange County from ocean to aquifer; speculatively, like Velo-City‘s Toronto bicycle metro (which, as it happens, has a less-speculative southern Californian counterpart, the Backbone Bikeway Network).  Go over, go under, re-deploy, tag along, piggyback.

Second, there are fantastic opportunities created by thinking about the architectural act as a hack rather than an object (whether or not the hack produces an object).  These opportunities were one of the primary themes of our post on “the best architecture of the decade”, which included both examples of hacks that lack a traditional architectural object — the iPhone, Kiva — and architectural projects executed as hacks — Quinta Monroy, Parque Biblioteca Espana.  Perhaps most relevant of the hacks cataloged there, given that the topic at hand is automobile traffic, is the MIT Smart Cities group’s CityCar, which utterly inverts the architectural methodology of the plan.  Instead of designing a new form for cities, and then producing buildings which fit that form, the Smart Cities group has designed both a technology — the CityCar — and a series of ways in which that technology would interact with the city (as a battery in a smart grid, as a part of an even more advanced traffic control system that would adjust congestion pricing in real time to efficiently distribute traffic over time and space), confident that doing so will enable ways of life that will generate positive changes in the city.  Notably, all these cases are new ways of utilizing existing infrastructures (the iPhone, Kiva, CityCar) or of thinking about architecture as an infrastructure (Quinta Monroy, Parque Biblioteca Espana).  Infrastructure is not made obsolete by avoiding object fixation.  Rather, it becomes increasingly important, as a material instantiation of non-corporeal forces and thus the potential physical locus of hacks.

In both cases — whether the hack is understood as a way of implementing a new infrastructure or as a new kind of architectural act — the key realization is that successful shifts in urban form will only happen when they are paired with successful alterations of the infrastructures, systems, and flows that generate those forms.  Attempts to construct a new vision for the city that fail to grapple with the underlying systems that, like traffic, constitute and produce the city will ultimately either be ineffective or collapse catastrophically.

For additional reading on the physical infrastructure of traffic control, I recommend CLUI’s online exhibition, Loop Feedback Loop.

[Aggregate operation in the Reliance pit mine, Irwindale, California; photograph by Steve Rowell, via CLUI]

The fourth chapter of The Infrastructural City, “Margins in our Midst: Gravel”, is written by Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of mammoth‘s favorite Los Angeles-based landscape research organization, the Center for Land Use Interpretation.  In “Margins”, Coolidge describes the curious situation of Irwindale, a suburb of Los Angeles, playing on the use of the term “margin” to refer both to the edge condition of the city — Irwindale “lies at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains”, which delineate the northern limits of greater Los Angeles — and to the rock aggregate mined in Irwindale.

[Pit mines in southwest Irwindale, via Bing Maps]

The rather wonderful reality, perhaps often obscured by the seeming banality of concrete and asphalt, is that both the buildings of Los Angeles and the spaces between them — streets, courtyards, sidewalks, driveways — are constructed from tiny shards of the surrounding mountain ranges, ossified with cement and petroleum.  Though concrete and asphalt often seem like infinitely available materials — only becoming visible once they are whole and ready for use in the beds of asphalt pavers and concrete mixers — they are, in fact, associated with specific landscapes of extraction, much like any other product of contemporary society.  For the greater Los Angeles region, Irwindale is the locus of that extraction, a small city pitted by seventeen major aggregate quarries, “so full of holes that more of the land in the city is a pit than not”:

“Of the seventeen major pits in the Irwindale area only four are being mined at the moment.  Many of the others are idle, having already been mined to their permitted depth of 200 feet, and having met their limitations in size by running up to the edges of adjacent properties and roadways.  In many cases the material extends to a thousand feet deep and the quarries are trying to get permits to go deeper.  [One of the main pit operators,] Vulcan, estimates that if they could go another 150 feet, their Irwindale pits would have another thirty years of life.  The city, on the other hand, having literally lost so much of its taxable surface area, is interested in bringing the inactive pits back up to grade, so they can develop the land in a more economically productive way.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the spatial dominance of these landscapes of extraction within Irwindale, the un-mined zones of the city are also dominated by “marginal” uses, as Coolidge relates: the Irwindale Speedway, constructed on a “giant slab of asphalt” capping a former pit mine, hosts races, notably including the “D1 Grand Prix”, the nation’s premier “drifting” race, and itself an activity that lies at the margins of automotive racing; landfills, primarily holding construction waste; the Miller brewery; and, of course, Irwindale Avenue, a typical southern Californian main drag, “lined with fast food restaurants”, “muffler shops and storefronts”.  The most fascinating of these additional margins is the network of dams that Coolidge describes, acting first as flood-and-aggregate control, but also as a sort of slow, passive mining system:

“Beyond the pits, one of the key landscape features in the region is the Santa Fe Dam, an arc of piled rock nearly five miles long.  Built by the Army Corps, it has never really had to be used for its designed purpose–yet.  It was made to defend the land downstream from catastrophic floods and debris flows.  These are occasional storm events, which have been very destructive to some parts of the city, where unconsolidated rock from the mountains is mobilized by prolonged rain, and tumbles down the canyons and river valleys like a slow motion avalanche of coarse rock, gravel, and mud, destroying everything in its path.  There are hundreds of check dams higher up in the mountains now, and these catch the majority of the flows before they reach the valley (the dam basins themselves are periodically emptied by the aggregate industry).

Structures like the Santa Fe Dam, the Sepulveda Dam, the Hansen Dam, and the Whittier Narrows Dam are last line of defense, built downslope to hold back a major flow that makes it out of the mountains, like a geologic shock absorber.  Behind these dams are undevelopable areas that need to stay empty to contain the material from this potential unscheduled aggregate delivery.  The permitted use of the land here is ephemeral: oddly disorganized wildlife areas and recreation zones.”

[The Santa Fe Dam, via Bing Maps]

It is important to note, at this point, that describing these landscapes and uses as “marginal” is not intended to be normative, but rather descriptive: while in this case the marginal landscapes of Irwindale do happen to sit at physical margin of Los Angeles, it is their position on the psychological margin of Los Angeles which we find more interesting, and more important to the study (and design) of the infrastructural city, generally.

Architects and landscape architects are, historically, most interested in — and most often employed to work on — the prominent, “significant”, symbolic cores of cities.  Think, for instance, of the disproportionate effort expended by the ASLA on advocating for the allocation of funds to renovation of the National Mall, and of the buildings on the AIA’s latest list of honor awards.  Or: how many architecture schools send students into historic cities to sketch monuments and courthouses, and how many send their students to the edge of suburbia to sketch muffler shops and fast food restaurants?

[Pit mine in Irwindale, via Bing Maps]

It is hard, of course, to blame a profession for wanting to highlight its most prominent products (and, correspondingly, entirely natural for societies to focus their creative energies on places of commonly-held symbolic worth), but the degree to which we exclusively define our professions in relationship to those prominent products has the effect of excluding us from conversations about the ordinary.  This becomes particularly problematic when we realize that — as studies such as Coolidge’s “Margins” indicate — ordinary and marginal places actually compose the bulk of the territory of the infrastructural city.

[The Miller Plant, via Bing Maps]

Perhaps this is part of the reason that utopian visions of the city — including, we think, even many visions which would not necessarily claim that descriptor for themselves, such as New Urbanism — tend not to have any place for marginal terrain.  That might even suggest an interesting way in which to arrive at a negative definition of a utopia: a harmfully-drawn utopia is a vision of the city which excludes marginal places.  That definition is obviously simplistic, if only because utopias are not easily or properly divided into “negative” (harmful) and “positive” (useful) categories, but it does serve to extend mammoth‘s consistent argument that it is vital to work with the city we have, to not make plans which wish away the parts of the city that we find undesirable or uninteresting, if only because, as Coolidge notes, the margins are literally the foundations of the city.

Barry Lehrman, author of the first chapter of The Infrastructural City, discusses the genesis of the chapter and shares details from both earlier drafts of the chapter and his thesis project, which was to design “an alternate dust mitigation system to restore Owens Lake and create a hybrid landscape for tourism and habitat”, in Writing ‘Infrastructure of the Void’.  Lehrman will be posting additional material each day this week, including more details on that design project, “an Owens Lake/Los Angeles Aqueduct bibliography, the Owens Lake Dust Mitigation project team, and a podcast“.  As we’ve been discussing parallels between Owens Lake and the Everglades, both here and at F.A.D., Lehrman has also posted a project for the Miami Lakes Belt, “Emergent Urbanism”, which proposes a slightly tongue-in-cheek “Miami Archipelago”.

Free Association Design asks what Owens Lake tells us about the meaning of the term “urban”, and looks at Owens Lake as an example of how twentieth-century infrastructures were produced by a “viscous feedback loop” of “crisis-action-crisis”, in Problematic Surfaces and Collateral Urbanism: Reading into the Owens Lake Parable.  A follow-up post, Reconstructing the Void, compares Owens Lake to the Everglades, noting the impossibility of returning such heavily infrastructural landscapes to their pre-anthropogenic condition — which, of course, is not to say that there is no healthier or more ecologically productive future possible.

DPR-Barcelona curates a fantastic selection of photography of Owens Lake, while speculating about leaping From Dust Problems to Towing Icebergs.

FASLANYC lets William Vollmann guide us toward Owens Lake as mythology, concluding with an astonishingly appropriate quote from Italian poet Eugenio Montale: Bring me the sunflower so that I might transplant it into burning fields of alkali, which tells us just about everything we need to know about Owens Lake.

Peter Nunns discusses the strange ecologies of disrupted landscapes outside of LA and Seattle, linking the production of atomic bombs, glow-in-the-dark-feces, toxic dust storms, and the power infrastructure of Los Angeles.  In another post, the anti-infrastructural nation, he describes a handful of pieces of New Zealand’s infrastructural history, painting New Zealand’s tendency towards fragmentation and away from centralization as the polar opposite of the southern Californian tendency towards unification and mega-infrastructures.

Nam Henderson considers Owens Lake as a new nature and a frontier, in Preserving the integrity of the void.

Peter Sigrist emphasizes the ethical dimensions of Owens Lake at Polis.

Next Monday, we’ll be discussing David Fletcher’s “Flood Control Freakology”, which explores the ecologies of the highly modified Los Angeles River, as well as Lane Barden’s photo essay, “The River”.

We’ll try to update this post with additional links as more material is posted this week.  If you have responded to this week’s chapter and we haven’t added a link here, please let us know via email or in the comments.