Infrastructure and the Future
Beto Lopez The position of creating architecture as a single entity that’s going to solve this is kind of asinine. This is a multidisciplinary challenge. If I look at the work that IDEO does and how project teams are sourced, it’s not just industrial designers solving problems with a customer for a potential user’s needs. It’s taking sociologists, anthropologists, and people of varied backgrounds to understand the problem and to give perspective. I think giving one discipline the task of solving this alone is misguided. What are the kinds of perspectives we need to actually address this issue? We’re talking about very large scales and layers of systems, right? One person, one individual, and one disciplinary background looking at space isn’t the only way to look at the problem or the opportunities that that problem might have for us. Clare Lyster There was an overtone in the first section that suddenly the whole infrastructure movement is going to reduce the discipline of architecture to problem solving—to solving problems that we inherently cannot solve. We can address certain climatic and environment issues, but I think we have to prohibit ourselves from becoming infrastructural activists. Yes, the project is a multidisciplinary one, but the title of this conference is “the architect’s role.” So let me be the selfish architect for the moment. How does the discipline of architecture use the interest in infrastructure as a way to recuperate the architect’s role in design, and do it in a way that’s not a form of activism? It’s an opportunity for the discipline to readdress how it actually enters urban projects, whether it’s at the scale of designing a new car prototype or designing a whole new transportation infrastructure. If we find new models for thinking about the architect, then we can go back out and deploy those models in the urban, regional, and global sectors. But we can’t reduce ourselves to problem solvers, because there are a lot of people out there who can solve problems better than we can. For us, it’s about design, it’s about leadership, it’s about recuperating a kind of confidence in the discipline.
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