never mind the buildings
A selection of homegrown infrastructural failures in the past decade: New York went dark in 2003, New Orleans’ levees failed in 2005, Minneapolis’ main inter10
state crossing fell in 2007. This past spring, a massive water main rupture forced the residents of Boston and twenty-nine surrounding towns to boil or buy their water for days. At these moments, the American myth of the self-reliant frontiersman falls away to reveal a people whose existence is built upon cheap and widespread infrastructural provision. Architecture is deeply dependent upon this web of urban services to locate, construct, and sustain its creations (even an off-the-grid house is typically built with materials from on-the-grid factories). David Harvey has argued that physical networks are the foundational step in the production of space. They lay out the boundaries within which architects and others further define material experience. Yet it is only recently that architecture as a discipline has begun to investigate infrastructure’s spatial potential. “Infrastructure” first appeared in Washington political columns in the 1950s as an obscure NATO term for French airfields. Newspapers began to use it commonly in the 1970s to describe the public works of previous decades falling into disrepair. Thus infrastructure was linked early on with crisis, with operative questions of how to reinforce and repair. This began to change in the late 1990s, when academic geographers in the UK (Matthew Gandy, Stephen Graham, Simon Marvin, Erik Swyngedouw, and Nigel Thrift, among others) took up earlier accounts of infrastructural development by historians of public works and technology. Reading those determinist histories through postmodern social theory placed infrastructure within an emerging narrative of global urban flows.