Infrastructure and the Future
Hubert Murray Well, in the sense that you can think on the hard side, there are things that connect one thing to another. The primary elements, such as buildings, schools, what-have-you, are connected by secondary elements, such as sewers, electricity, and so on. Questions of necessity and sufficiency then come in, as a sort of dialogue between those two. It’s the soft side that has to be the sort of kicker in this conversation. For instance, for the last few months we’ve been talking about health care. I would regard universal health care as a fundamental piece of infrastructure for our imagined community of the United States of America. Sarah Williams Goldhagen Even though we are going to focus on the built environment today, underneath the built environment is a vision of what civic life is and what social life is and what goals are that we want to promote, which is what you’re talking about. This is really essential in thinking about how we want to conceptualize and more forward with infrastructure. So there is an inevitable inter-meshing between the social, the political, and inevitably the economic… and actual, physical design in this sense. Robert Culver The thing that has not been dealt with in this commonwealth— and I would suggest in most states in the United States, and certainly in Europe in something like three hundred years—is the geopolitical infrastructure. For architects to be successful, we must start to bring into focus the dysfunction, the disruptive, slow geopolitical process that allows us to make decisions about where we’re going to build, what we’re going to build, and how we’re going to build it. We are, in fact, going to be in very, very deep trouble relative to the future built environment because things are just moving too quickly—as relates to the energy front, as relates to issues of sustainability or non sustainability, as relates to the way in which populations are growing and expanding, as relates to the question of how cities are going to be used versus how the suburban environment is either going to be destroyed or built up.
Orange County Great Park, TEN Arquitectos and DTAH, Irvine, CA
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