Infrastructural Urbanism

J.G. Ballard, Infrastructural Urbanism.

“Think only of essentials: The Physics of the gyroscope, the Flux of Photons, the architecture of Very large structures”

“Infrastructure, in its very nature, is similar to landscape in that it is continually evolving, simultaneously precise and indeterminate and works strategically. It allows multiple authors and accommodates existing conditions and local contingency while maintaining overall functional continuity. Infrastructure constructs the site itself through the division, allocation and construction of surfaces, provision of services to support future programs and establishment of networks for movement, communication and exchange”.

In this article the author explains the evolution of the design process that has past through different stages. It’s a movement that identified and described in different images to show a certain period of development, like moment in which the technical and aesthetic formed a unified whole.

He starts with sequence of three images spanning six decades of the twentieth century.

• 1^st image: an Aircraft Carrier USS Lexington, it is bulk of the craft looms over an invisible horizon, a blank open-mouthed face stares back at the viewer; published 1935, in collection edited by Le Corbusier, the caption reads: “Neptune rises from the sea, crowned with strange garlands, the weapons of mars”.

It presents the instrumentality of advanced engineering design and organization of the forces of production that made construction at this scale possible process. It was fully linked to the war machine but integrated into a meaningful cultural and aesthetic framework, even to the point of establishing continuity with classic mythology.

• 2^nd image: the linear Andrea Doria Foundering off the coast of Nantucket in 1956, (Twenty years after the 1^st image) Recalling to iconic status of the linear in the theories of modern architecture.

These developments cannot separate themselves from architecture movements. The author describes that “although during cold war, the modernist dream of an integration of technology and aesthetics was no longer believable, the social and technical forces of modernity tried detached from the production of images, both in popular and higher culture”.

• 3^rd image: B-24 bomber factory in Forth Worth, Texas.

The implementation of the modernist dream of a rational production was influence of the wartime economy where the standardization of material, bodies and time that allowed such incredibly efficient production.

The effect of this shift toward images and signs is that architecture disciplinary frame shifts. He explains, architecture relationship to its material is however indirect.

Beyond style or formal issues, infrastructural urbanism offers a new model for practice and renewed sense of architecture’s potential to structure the future of the city. It understands architecture as material practice as an activity that works in and among the world of things and not exclusively with meaning and image.

Architecture and urbanism, technique does not belong to an individual but to the discipline as whole. Architecture works with cultural and social variables as well as with physical materials, and capacity to signify is one tool available to the architect working in the city. Architecture is uniquely capable of structuring the city in way not available to practices such as literature, film, politics etc.

The critics on infrastructure Urbanism is retrograde, bordering on fascist. It decries new urbanism as nothing more than conventional sprawl dressed up with superficial stylistic cues.