Infrastructure and the Future
If leveraging the local and regional is primary in a shared infrastructural plan of action, then a secondary, aesthetically agnostic prospect for vision lies in the exploration of evolving typologies. It is here that the role of the architect rises out of the multidisciplinary design milieu as discrete from the urban designer and landscape architect. Marilyn Taylor proposes that relevance for the designer in the future of infrastructure lies at the intersection of land use and transportation, the infrastructural systems that relate most directly to the design professions. Building upon this proposition, there is opportunity at an under-engaged middle scale of urban space, where landscape, infrastructure, and built space meet, for the reengagement of type in the radical embrace of contemporary global systems of communication and local interaction. The trend of projects in current practice is toward scalar extremes. On one hand there is the design of tabula rasa urban fabric (pick any ecocity); on the other, there is the design of the independent and efficient, or self-sufficient, buildings (choose from the growing array of LEED Platinum projects). Few critically address the scale of civic interaction, the space where the built environment grows from the meeting up of landscape and infrastructure. Such design does not occur in the aerial view, the plan for the autonomous project, or the ecologically ideal detail. The drawing convention of choice may be the systemically conjoined building section as housed within the infrastructural layering of urban space. This middle scale is essential to a high quality of civic life as well as efficient infrastructural systems; it is the collective human interface with the systems that enables our contemporary lifestyle, bears out our cultural desires, and will ultimately determine the success of future multi-disciplinary research and action. Designing the experience between surfaces and systems requires the growth of inhabitable spaces to support the connective tissue of infrastructure, and the determination of how and where we plug into these systems. It is this locally specific moment of encounter that must be impeccably designed for maximum efficiency and a culture of user pleasure.
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