Greek architect Aristide Antonas has contributed to our last issue [Quaderns #265 'House and Contradiction'] with a visual of his project Population of Fragments or the Warehouse Man. This project and its accompanying series of images are a representation of a system of independent users that substitute a community, inspired somehow by Tyqqun’s Bloom Theory. While developing this project, some of the questions that emerged are: How can we transform this reality to a political condition? How can we think about the Internet as a conscious space for another type of legislations now that both the state and the market withdraw?

What follows are some fragments and thoughts by Aristide Antonas about this project:

Magic exotic island. Interface version. Antonas Office

“I will be making a contrived description concerning the contemporary Internet Man. In this description of him, the Internet Man is organized as the hero of withdrawal. His place of reference is a warehouse. It is through here that my hero strolls, in his own special way. The description of the hero and the situation is not without a certain manufacturing practice of my own: I therefore name the character of the short narrative that follows: the Warehouse Man. The hero of the warehouse is interesting in that he is unable to structure himself. And yet this inability already characterizes him. He is conceived as a character precisely because of this inability; this inability is realized thanks to an organized system of shared, specific characteristics that are adopted by the Warehouse Man and which, at the same time, structure him as a character.

In terms of the Warehouse Man, there are three pairs of concepts that concern me. Through them I will describe the man and the situation: the hero lives in the peculiar, contemporary city. The first pair of concepts that concerns him is Material and Immaterial Homelessness. The second: Somnambulism and Insomnia. And, finally: Control panel and Warehouse [...] Even more so, as will become evident, the Warehouse Hero interprets the contemporary inhabitant of the Internet. The three pairs I introduced are intertwined. At the same moment the concepts are described (as if they make up a glossary or a small dictionary), I attempt to demonstrate their relationships. Material – Immaterial Homelessness, Somnambulism – Insomnia, Control Panel – Warehouse.”

“Before anything else” the Warehouse Man is manufactured by a disturbance of the condition of time and space. At once I ask myself: Can we imagine or can we already see the distortions of time and space which occur from contemporary man residing in the Internet? Does the technically described continuous on-line life have noteworthy consequences on the ethical aspect or the political experience of the society which will ensue? Or is the Warehouse Man nothing new but a mere transformation of an older character?

Nodes techniques. Antonas Office

Regarding the pair of concepts mentioned above, Antonas started with Homelessness, that has taken on a transcendental power in contemporary thought. Focusing on this concept, he pointed that since 1920, in his Theory of the Novel, György Lukács uses the term “transcendental homelessness” to describe man’s urgent, impatient expectation to be “at home” wherever he may find himself. He adds:

“Homelessness was linked to a certain modern concept of “the power to reside anywhere”. Thus, contemporary homelessness is related to the detachment from specific familiar places, as well as to a certain abstract familiarity that is uninterested in the peculiarity of any place. Therefore, the Material – Immaterial Homelessness points to the specific chasm between the literalness and metaphor of homeless residency: between literalness and metaphor, we are asked to talk about homelessness in the modern-day city [...] Buildings, streets, sidewalks, plants, parks and lights were all systematically organized as the material equipment of cities. They were also organized – primarily – as abstract representations. The distribution of space is always at work in modern cities. The apartment actualizes the concept of the urban allotment. Even though it usually remains uninstituted, it describes the law of the urban cell: the right to housing may or may not be constitutionally guaranteed but, in any case, the cell of the apartment embodies the abstract right of participating in a certain apportionment. The inhabitant of the city resides in the apartment. The apartment, as an urban cell which proceeds to multiply (as it finds its place in the urban fabric), builds the city: the city thus emerges as a system for the distribution of housing or as a peculiar archival machine.”

The Warehouse Man. Prison version. Antonas Office.

“Two human characters of the city abstain today from possessing an apartment. For different reasons and in radically different ways, two heroes in the contemporary metropolis make us wonder, immediately after we announce them, whether they belong to what we have, hitherto, termed the “city” [...] Their profile is defined by global characteristics: they are not the protagonists of a local play. The inhabitant of the Internet and the city’s Homeless Person are certainly both homeless. The former is living the metaphorical experience of transcendental homelessness, while the latter has been thrown into the literalness of homelessness on the stage of the city. The metaphor of homelessness is experienced as the condition of an infinite interface.

The hero of the warehouse, on whom I have been focusing from the outset, is an inhabitant of the Internet and an important figure of communal life to whom we refer when we think about the immaterial aspect of homelessness. The place of homelessness (immaterial and tortuously material) will direct every urban compilation of future societies. The difficulty of the homeless person to find a place defines the fact that yesterday’s city will not resemble tomorrow’s. The city no longer seeks simple positions for its homes, but different institutions of homelessness. Moreover: the increase in the number of possible positions for the Warehouse Man does not illustrate only Lukács’s argument for easy nomadic residency, but also the particular inability to reside in a world which is made up as a “population of fragments”. Communities that already form (in an invisible way) the contemporary city are composed of inhabitants of the Internet.

[...]

Accumulation transforms the resident of the Internet into a particular Warehouse Man. At the same time, faced with the voraciousness for stored things, the Warehouse Hero shapes the particular warehouse in which he lives.”

“Anything can be a thing of the Warehouse as long as it is already represented or is declared representable. We claim that in the Warehouse what takes place is not merely the consolidation of objects that were outside it through their classification and representation. The Warehouse contains only representations of objects, without the need to ever present the “objects themselves” [...] The search in the Warehouse is already a compilation of incongruous answers, it does not open the path to an open, unanswered question: it does not show the possible construction of a world organized by the inability to organize.

[...]

The collection of answers which each user receives in the Warehouse will become increasingly difficult to be explored at once as a whole: each answer separately inaugurates other questions and new manifold, fragmentary levels of answers.”

/// The Bloom’s Room, the Island Interface and the City Interface are images prepared at the Antonas office by Aristide Antonas and Katerina Koutsogianni.
/// Population of Fragments or the Warehouse Man is an essay by Aristide Antonas, translated by Mary Kitroef. The complete essay will be published soon both in Greek and English. More info: Antonas web-site.

The annual theme ‘Money’ is divided in three competitions:

- Territories. Jurors is David Garcia, founder of MAP Architects.
- Culture & Society. Juror is Pedro Gadanho, curator of Contemporary Architecture in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art MoMA.
- Environment. Juror is Keller Easterling, architect and writer from New York City and a professor at Yale University.

/// MAGNETIC NORTH, the Arctic lands [From Greenland to Iceland, via Svalbard].

On Monday Dec 9th 2014 [7pm CET] the winners of the Money-Territories competition will be announced on an event at Lauba. During this event, a number of interesting international guests including Mason White, Miha Turšič & Dragan Živadinov from Ksevt, Marko Peljhan, David Garcia of MAP Architects, Ethel Baraona Pohl & Cesar Reyes Najera of dpr-barcelona and Tomislav Pletenac, will take us on a journey through mistic spaces of Earth and Universe as a final event in the Territories Competition Era.

After results announcements a round table discussion on the topic Culture and Architecture of Extreme Environments will take place. Also the second competition of the series Culture & Society. Building Without Money: Create a Space for Cultural Exchange. [juror Pedro Gadanho of MoMA The Museum of Modern Art] will be launched.

/// There will be live streaming for those living abroad Zagreb. More info on twitter @_ThinkSpace_ and Facebook on Think-Space.

This book studies the strategies used by architects to secure commissions, sell projects and erect buildings. Although their modus operandi might seem to be mere marketing techniques, the economic conditions in each stage of a project that determines the final result cannot be overlooked.
Selling strategies are not taught in school, since it has traditionally been considered that architects cannot market themselves. Nor are they discussed among practicing professionals, since no one is willing to reveal his recipes for success. Therefore, there is no specific bibliography in this area, although architects have always been excellent salesmen for ideas.

California is a place for opportunities where results matter more than theory. Everyone working there uses strategies to secure profits. Most of the architects in the study were born or developed their careers in the area: Gehry (who lives in Santa Monica), Gensler (who lives in San Francisco), Ma (who is dean of USC), Jerde (who works in L.A.), Koolhaas (who created Amo on the basis of a project for the Universal Building in L.A.), Jobs (who founded Apple and worked in Cupertino) and Page and Brin (the founders of Google in Palo Alto).
The inclusion of software architects in the list of building architects may come as a surprise; however the change undergone by architecture justifies it. Nowadays, corporations do not commission buildings to represent them, but rather strategies to improve their brands, efficiency and sales. Offering these is also the work of today’s architects.

Nowadays architects are designing fewer buildings and focusing on designing strategies. Let’s begin to study them. We shall discover how they work and where can they take us. We are certainly going to need them to convince society that we can still be useful.

AUTHOR

Eduard Sancho Pou is the head of an architecture studio where he combines his work as an architect with his strategic consultancy activities. In the past, he was the director of Barcelona Centre Arquitectura, where he organized architecture exhibitions, colloquia, and conferences attended by international architects. He has also been an architectural consultant with the Swiss multinational Holcim, for the announcement of the Holcim Architectural Awards. Sancho Pou holds a doctorate (cum laude) from the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. He is currently a member of Cercle d´Arquitectura Research Group (UPC) and teaches to Phd students at the same university.

More info: Graham Foundation and arquia/próxima

As I leaned against the concrete balcony I became aware that an immense silence hung over the landscape around me. By a rare freak of flight control no aircraft were landing or taking off from the airport runways […] Looking closely at this silent terrain, I realized that the entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges. These encircled the vehicles below like the walls of a crater several miles in diameter. The silence continued.*

J.G. Ballard, Crash

Any infrastructure, as an element belonging to the social configuration of territory, is part of an invisible field, a realm beyond its immediate, tangible, physical context. Ports, terminals, and networks are vital supports for our economies. Yet the increasing speed and the breadth of change of our habits and forms of consumption has revealed the fragility of the links between the immaterial, shifting nature of infrastructures and their physical support, as well as the urgency of reflecting on the consequences that can be attributed to the different tempos of architecture and market fluctuations, the disjuncture between material and fleetingness.

Throughout the better part of the past century, architecture and urbanism continued to perpetuate the heroic representation of infrastructure. The cover of Space, Time & Architecture** features a highway roundabout instead of a building, and the Vegas strip was an emblem of the postmodern paradigm. This infrastructural conception was called into question in the 1960s and 1970s, as experimental practices reclaimed, not without a certain naïveté, the possibility of an instant architecture that would be capable of revealing the dysfunctional rifts between the useful life of infrastructures, their production, and their consumption.

We believe it is time to rethink an infrastructural model at risk of quickly becoming obsolete. This should be, particularly in our days, a vital task for architects: vindicating and domesticating a framework for action they have habitually been sidelined from.

Aware of our scarce resources, it is time to re-program the rigid models of the past, from the margins, designing flexible infrastructures free from rhetoric.

* J.G. Ballard, Crash, London, Vintage, 1995.
** Sigfried Gideon, Space, Time and Architecture, the Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harvard University, 1941.

Photo: Coke Bartrina (Girona-Costa Brava Airport)

But what does it mean to say that an infrastructural system is efficiently managing its environment? Consider two instances within a discrete category of infrastructural concerns: the problem of human effluence, or bodily waste.

In the early years of its growth, Chicago sat on a completely flat expanse of bedrock. At that time, the population dealt with its problem of effluence with a simple system of open drainage ditches. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, these ditches had become open channels of stagnant wastewater, which by mid-century came to be seen as a threat to human health. The city addressed this problem by way of a two-step, ten-year, ‘modernization’ project.

First, the entire downtown—which until then had sat on perfectly flat bedrock—was raised by several meters, in order to provide it a slope adequate to ensure proper rates of flow. Next, the first underground sewerage system in the United States was buried within the newly created slope. The project was completed in 1870, and in terms of relative expenditure and effort was far more radical than anything being proposed by infrastructural advocates today. Was the project a solution to the problem of Chicago’s effluent? We can return to that question. In any case, it certainly ensured that the effluent would efficiently flow away from the downtown.

Now take a more recent example, the Hyperion treatment plant, which is Los Angeles’ largest wastewater treatment facility—one of the largest in the world, in fact. Initially built in 1894 as a raw sewage discharge point into the Santa Monica Bay, it was “upgraded” during the 1970’s through a series of modernization efforts. It now “processes and treats 360 million-gallons per day,” and is generally regarded as one of the great American environmental achievements of the 20th Century.

Though spaced nearly one hundred years from one another, we find in each case, I think, two ways of understanding this very modern notion of ‘functionally efficient’ infrastructures. The first is through the lens of the kind of managerial discourse just quoted; that is, through the lens of a specific kind of language in which life is regarded first and foremost as a set of problems that can be managed through proper techniques of maintenance, monitoring, etc. This is a discourse that replaces the older, normative, deductive concept of ‘solution’ with the far more expansive, flexible and inductive concept of ‘management.’ It is a psychological orientation to the world that has expanded in tandem with the emergence and maturation of the modern bureaucracy, and the adiaphorization that typifies its subjects. Under the suzerainty of this logic, problems—which, in other words, are no longer solved-solved, but instead managed-solved—are rendered as sets of statistical monitoring data whose extents are actively confined to a certain range through processes of parameterization and regulation. This is ‘environmental management’ today.

But there is a second possibility, a second view onto these conditions, in which infrastructural elements like Hyperion function as remarkably convincing images of functionality. If we admit, for example, that Hyperion belongs to a system encompassing some 6500 miles of sewage lines, which during this decade alone has averaged roughly 600 Category 1 “sewage events” each year, and which itself sits within an even larger territorial system that, according to biologists, released some 28 million gallons of raw sewage into California waterways during 2008 alone…

Only when certain undeniable realities are made to illuminate the dark space beneath the rhetoric of managerial discourse—where systemic realities lurk unabashedly; where modernity is shown its own bowels—can we recognize that facilities like Hyperion are playing an active and highly visible role in the grand myth of manageability that we confer upon our infrastructures. Put differently: since their radical extension during the nineteenth century modern infrastructures have carried out their assigned tasks by ensuring the ‘proper’ distribution of the contents of modernity—cleanliness, comfort, convenience—by continually externalizing its discontents.

This strategy of negative externality has taken place simultaneously across two registers: conceptually and substantially. Conceptually, through ordinary words such as ‘byproduct,’ ‘waste,’ and ‘side-effects,’ the discontents of infrastructures are continually re-inscribed within a language of systemic functionality. And yet, at the very same time, the substantial material effluence of modernization is continually dispensed along infrastructures to an outside that is simultaneously abstract and real. That outside is simply any designated repository of continually externalized exponential accumulations: the inner city or its territorialized hinterlands; the Global South or the upper atmosphere; the inner lung or the adipose tissue …more or less anywhere beyond the ordinary perceptual grasp of the population specific to an infrastructural intervention.

These accumulations are themselves far more substantial than the pleasures they provide. The infrastructure of human effluent in the name of hygiene; the infrastructure of the commodity in the name of capital; the infrastructure of animal ‘processing’ in the name of appetite. In each case the managed accumulations outpace the pleasures, such that the functional language of infrastructures has, in a sense, always perfectly misrepresented, or precisely reversed, their material reality.

This has always been the case. The Chicago project instantly and exponentially intensified the amount of human effluent being released at a single point in the Chicago River. It also prepared the ground for a population explosion of staggering proportions, unrivaled in the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the project so quickly and drastically altered the composition of the river that in 1906 Upton Sinclair named its central section “Bubbly Creek,” in reference to the tremendous off-gassing that resulted from the decomposition of human effluent and swine entrails.
Today, at places like Hyperion—that is, at discrete but evident nodes in territorial systems—the concept of management centers on the treatment of effluent, through various processes, until it is ‘safe:’ that is, until its composition has achieved certain statistical-compositional parameters. At that point the liquid effluent is “clean enough to be discharged out at sea, through a 5-mile underwater pipeline.” In other words: everything is externalized, removed from our perceptual frame, substituted with the imagery of managerial prowess.

And here we confront a rather remarkable feature of this perceptual ruse: that even the so-called failures associated with these systems have come to reify and reinforce the grand theater of modern functionalism. The assertion that something has temporarily failed is of course a logical correlate to the assumption that it is usually functioning properly.

Take for example a recent failure that, while larger than average in size, is far from atypical. In 2006, 2 million gallons of raw sewage were released onto a Los Angeles beach in a single spill, when a pumping station immediately south of Hyperion failed. The spill lasted for 14 hours before being reported, and it was later remarked how surprising it was that even the fail-safe back-up alarm system had failed. The accident led authorities to quickly close off the beach while emergency crews tried to repair the pumping station and siphon away the sewage.

Like similar spills, it of course summoned a diverse mixture of elements though which ‘infrastructural events’ are produced—bureaucratically, discursively, sociopsychologically: cinematically. “Real time” mass media; the practices of scenario modeling and accident investigation; the managerial discourses of prevention, monitoring and response; public relations and engineering bravado as a politics of sanitation; the whole, sad spectacle unfolding as an urban dramaturgy of excrement. Hopeful and sincere, surrounding the event on all sides, these elements set the relations of cause and effect. They perform and form a kind of perceptual apparatus in which infrastructural processes are represented first and foremost as localized, brief spectacles; as discrete, fleeting failures within otherwise benign networks; tragic happenings that visit us for short time periods in specific places. This, too, is environmental management: a continual, exaggerated histrionics of functional-infrastructural salvation.

Apart from its many political ramifications (aren’t the most efficient infrastructures also the most effective forms of population control?), one of the disquieting qualities of this generic event-formula is its near total exclusion of the most pressing realities facing the world today. So many of our unfolding catastrophes are simply not amenable to the kinds of spectacular productions to which we have grown accustomed. In most cases they are slow processes, unfolding across months, years, decades, and centuries. Often the scale of their incidence renders them invisible to our methods of documentation: microscopic phenomena comprising accumulations that are, paradoxically, imperceptibly large.

We are presented with two distinct time signatures, one of which actively conceals the other. The first—the managerial time of infrastructures—is the time of statistical reasoning and the calculus of variations. Up-tempo and staccato, it is punctuated by regular crescendos, which we call accidents or malfunctions, and which are immediately attributed to either temporary failures or resolvable localized inefficiencies. Managerial time renders systemic failures un-visible. The second time—the historical time of infrastructures, or the time of accumulations—is a slowly unfolding, long-wave threnody, in which the full extents of modernization are evident.

In the first signature, where the concept of efficiency has been fashioned so as to exclude its own externalizations, our managerial rhetoric makes sense. In the second, that same language appears utterly absurd, contradictory even.

The widespread inability to recognize or acknowledge the historical time of accumulations is the most pronounced and obvious symptom of an entrenched infrastructuralism. Particularly acute today among urbanists and bureaucrats—for whom efficiency is an almost erotic obsession—infrastructuralism is a modern pathology in which the rhetoric and imagery of managerial discourse serve to erase any differentiation between primary and reflexive modernization. Infrastructuralism is marked by the self-veiling of a truth—a terrible truth, unendurable for The Moderns—that the most efficient methods of environmental management are also in fact the most destructive and wasteful. It is a lie we tell ourselves in place of truths that would change us if we were made to face them, and the primary material-moral alibi for the supposed superiority of our limitless, ‘civilized’ lives.

Are we now completely unable to dream of antiinfrastructure? Of urbanisms that do not exists solely at the behest of efficient dispersal, distribution, and externalization? Of populations that are not victims of their own cynical machinery? For now, we simply play out this drama, willingly blinded to the circuitry of its staging.

As interesting as this work is and continues to be, it was a Columbia University student of historical preservation named Michael Caratzas, whose 2005 graduate thesis made me think about infrastructure in truly new ways. The project was a proposed “historic preservation” of the Cross-Bronx Expressway in New York City. For those not familiar with the Expressway, it was the notorious masterwork of Robert Moses and his public works force. The roadway, finished in 1955, displaced thousands and gutted several lively working-class neighborhoods in the Bronx of their most central spaces and streets. Many continue to think of this as one of the most awful roadways in New York, if not the United States.

In his proposed preservation, Caratzas suggests that these types of infrastructural networks can now be viewed as historical constructs. He has developed a “historical” vision of the possible pasts that might be recovered within a network society or a network culture — ie a social sphere defined by relationships to and within networks. A preservation of the Cross-Bronx Expressways is a fascinating idea because it takes the discursive apparatus of preservation, which is often used for buildings or built landscapes, and directs it into a vast infrastructural system that is difficult to contemplate with a historical consciousness. The Cross Bronx Expressway is a stretch of highway without clear boundaries; it is filled with both a difficult beauty and the more obvious unpleasantries. Because it is a roadway, we tend to think of it as a site demanding constant upgrades. How does one simultaneously preserve and upgrade a roadway system?

Perhaps more to the point, Caratzas notes that the construction of infrastructural systems generally, highways more directly, and the Cross-Bronx expressway more particularly, often destroyed historical neighborhoods and buildings. They are anti-preservation incarnate. We tend to view these mid-century highways as so suspect that they are outside of that realm we call culture. A few historians and curators recently historicized and focused upon the spatial power evident in the Cross-Bronx Expressway and Moses’ other New York City projects. Yet, we safely and nostalgically celebrate the work of people such as Moses in museum exhibitions. In this context, looking at a model, the true power and horror of what was staged can be appreciated with a historical mentality that is more pacifying than sublime. The Cross-Bronx is where Robert Moses decided to “swing the meat ax” — displacing thousands and destroying entire precincts of the City for this stretch of highway.

Caratzas thesis inspired the image that accompanies this brief essay. This image is part of a series commissioned by The Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for the Environment and its guest curator, Geoff Manaugh. The exhibition — Landscape Futures — invited architects, landscape architects, artists, and historians to envision the future landscape from their particular disciplinary and theoretical vantage point. The image is part of a contribution that examines how we might think about and see historical landscapes in the future.

The image, and the others in the series, depict various reconfigurations of the type of lights, vitrines, podia, stanchions, and scaffolds used to protect and visualize historical objects. This is the skein of material that surrounds something like the Dendur Room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. We encounter this type of lighting when we contemplate objects and non-human life in museums or zoos, although generally unaware of its presence. This web-work of museological stuff — lights, podia, vitrines—transforms stuff into objects of our interest. Here, a museological, historicizing framework is laced into the wound created by the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the surrounding neighborhood. It reconfigures the illumination of the highway away from roadway traffic and more towards the highway as a physical totality—as something to be contemplated. It also emphasizes the landscaped residues of the project. The lights begin to announce the Cross-Bronx as a historical object, as much as an organizational network or system.

This image is not an explicit call for preservation, in the manner of Caratzas thesis. However it certainly suggests the presence of a preservation mentality within this place. But more significant, and like Caratzas, it begins to suggest that it may be the curators, preservationists, and historians—and not the engineers—that begin to recuperate the United States’ infrastructure both as a thing and an idea. This in turn, transforms what we understand both infrastructure and history to be.

David Gissen

*Figure: “Cross-Bronx Expressway” David Gissen with Victor Hadjikyriacou, renderer, 2011. Included in the exhibition Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices and Architectural Inventions, Nevada Museum of Art (August 13, 2011–February 12, 2012) Background image, courtesy of Andrew Moore: “Cross-Bronx Expressway, View East at the Jerome Avenue Overpass at Night, 2006”

This weirdness, in the context of architectural critique, is that parainfrastructures paradoxically gain their strength and appeal from having been designed with a certain disregard for aesthetics. Parainfrastructures are constructed out of the banal materials of twentieth-century industrial innovation like synthetic fabrics, geotextiles, and industrial plastics, not the refined and expensive finishes of high-corporate architecture. Structurally, they depend on ties, straps, bendable rods, and air compressors—temporary, flexible, contingent engineering.

Here, these architectural parainfrastructures have kinship with the new kind of infrastructures the opening editorial, John May’s “Infrastructuralism”, and Javier Garcia-German’s “Infrastructure and Time” imply the need for through their critiques of “an infrastructural model at risk of quickly becoming obsolete” [1]:

“Against this static view, more recently infrastructures have been conceptualised as open systems. If during modernity they were designed as isolated, highly specialised systems that remained static in the face of external contingencies, they have now progressed towards being viewed as interactive systems, with a specific spatial organisation (structure) and behaviour (functioning) continually undergoing adaptation to changing surrounding circumstances.” [2]

The responsiveness and adaptivity of these new alternative infrastructures can be contrasted with the qualities of traditional hard infrastructure in the same way that the flexibility and contingency of the engineering of parainfrastructures can be contrasted with the qualities of traditional building engineering.

The appeal of parainfrastructures (both as a class of architectural objects and as an alternative format for infrastructures) is not only aesthetic; it is also organizational, in that parainfrastructures operate primarily as organizational architectures.  In fact, their aesthetic qualities are generated by their organizational qualities—the Instant City derives its shape from the interior activities it hosts, rather than conforming interior activities to its shape.

Oddly, this points to a way that parainfrastructures are more like the heroic modern infrastructures of the twentieth century than they are different: they all gain their aesthetic power from the blunt translation of organizational qualities into material structure [3]. Just as the appeal of Roger Sauquet’s proposal for “Emergency Solutions” comes from envisioning the interiors of abandoned airports continually being restructured by the programmatic dictates of a temporary and provisional architecture of “internal versatility”, much of the aesthetic pleasure and power of hard infrastructure—like a cloverleaf ramp looping overhead, or a dam towering over river—comes from the direct link between how the infrastructure is structured and how it organizes.  Altering the aesthetics of an infrastructure without considering its organizational performance at best fails to tap into this fundamental source of sublimity, and at worst begins to divorce the infrastructure being designed from the very qualities that make it so aesthetically powerful.

Thus while the deployment of parainfrastructures and hard infrastructures responds to vastly different conditions and generates wildly divergent potentials, in both cases the architect—if she wants to harness their full aesthetic power—must learn to subordinate aesthetics.

“Are we now completely unable to dream of antiinfrastructure?” asks John May in his introductory essay titled “Infrastructuralism: The Pathology of Negative Externalities.” His insightful and provocative critique is followed by four case studies, together comprising a section of the magazine titled “1 Essay x 4 Cases”. Of the four cases that follow, the first, Heathrow Airplot” by Paisajes Emergentes is arguably the only outright piece of antiinfrastructure: it proposes to prevent the expansion of Heathrow Airport by positioning a series of large Pink Floyd-like balloons to occupy flightpaths so that they literally stand–or float–in the way of progress. The other three cases (Brockholes Wetland Visitor Centre by Adam Khan, Lolita restaurant by Langarita-Navarro, and Nagelhaus by Caruso St John), all of which have something to do with highway infrastructure, relate more tenuously to May’s thesis. Significantly, the texts accompanying each of these four works are architects’ project statements; not critical reflections. The same goes for the works included in the Observatory section at the end of the magazine. I guess architecture critics need not apply here.

The sections in the middle, “Archive 1971”, “3 Essays x 1 Case”, and “Guest” are much more coherent and watertight. The Archive section features a different year in every issue; a sort of blast-from-the-past. In this issue, the year 1971 is featured, and includes an interview with José Miguel de Prada Poole followed by historical research and firsthand accounts of the building of experimental inflatable structures. 3 Essays x 1 Case looks back at Girona-Costa Brava Airport, a building which has had its share of ups and downs during its lifetime. The instigation to look back and reflect on past work is one of the most significant turns this edition of Quaderns has taken. Architecture takes on a life of its own when it becomes inhabited; a reality that can sometimes be stranger than fiction. For an architecture magazine to critically reflect back on the real life of buildings, and not just ones idealized in design intentions, is praiseworthy. The conduciveness of architecture to a better shelf-life might just become a little more lubricated.

Continuity can be seen as another quality of this edition of Quaderns magazines. Each issue begins with a review of the last one and ends with a segue into the next, which in this case is preservation. A debate, if it were (only) to erupt, is well served by the weaving of a continuous thread through consecutive issues of a magazine. And provoking debate is exactly what magazines such as Quaderns should be doing.

Rafael Gómez-Moriana

In “Infrastructuralism” [2] John May identifies how infrastructure has been historically instrumental in externalizing these excesses and the associated ‘discontents’; its modus operandi to remove them from sight. Yet he also illustrates how in our ‘modern pathology’ of efficiency we have hidden our excesses in plain view through a managerial discourse. One can readily anticipate a tendency to repeatedly fall back into these modes of thinking, even as we try to escape them.

“Are we now completely unable to dream of antiinfrastructure? Of urbanisms that do not exist solely at the behest of efficient dispersal, distribution and externalization? Of populations that are not victims of their own cynical machinery? For now we will simply play out this drama, willingly blinded to the circuitry of its staging.”⁠ [3]

Javier García-Germán [4] proposes ‘anticipation’ and ‘resilience,’ derived from the dynamic and abundant systems of nature, as a means to introduce time and unpredictability into our conception of infrastructure. Yet in the practical implementation of these models, what is to prevent resilience from being subordinated by the managerial discourse, reduced to a utilitarian model? Architectural discourse too has little agency whilst the language of efficiency pervades.

Perhaps a counter-language is needed: one that instead radically embraces excess. In her writings Elizabeth Grosz [5] has proposed a framework for thinking of the art of nature as its non-utilitarian excess. Sexual difference, through the vagaries of attraction between sexes and the diverse forms enabled by their unpredictable reproduction, she argues, forms the basis of both nature’s excessiveness and art. Art becomes here the intensification of pure sensation: the visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile and gustatory intensification produced by all species differently. “Territory is that which is produced by the elaborate, if apparently useless activity, of construction, attention-grabbing and display that marks most of sexual selection.” [6] For Grosz, architecture is the precondition of this art as through the architectural framing of territory that the condition for the emergence of this intensification of sensation is created. Perhaps within this concept of framing intensification is a seed of how architecture might help to dream of May’s ‘antiinfrastructure’?

The idea of creative production as elaboration, or for its own sake, is already evident in the ‘Instant City’ projects as in the ‘Heathrow Airplot’. Perhaps the next step, as Carlos Ferrater reflected of his experience, is to destroy as we build. Embracing excess necessarily complicates the task of “rethink[ing] an infrastructural model at risk of quickly becoming obsolete.” [7] Immediately it suggests that within any a priori condemnation of excess – including of construction – is a danger of regression to comfortable paradigms. Might we imagine antiinfrastructure then as that which exceeds, rather than mimics or tames, the excessiveness of nature? Territory as a stage for artful seduction? Infrastructure as a form of potlatch between city and its territory, earth and its atmosphere, or between humanity and other species.

Anna Tweeddale  is an architect, urbanist, artist, and educator based between Europe and Melbourne. She has taught architectural design and theory at RMT and Monash Universities in Melbourne, Australia.

Notes
[1] “Editorial: Parainfrastructures” in Quaderns 262: “Parainfrastructures”, 2011, p. 1.
[2] John May, “Infrastructuralism: The Pathology of Negative Externalities” in Quaderns 262: “Parainfrastructures”, 2011.
[3] May, p. 6.
[4] Javier Garcia-Germán, “Infrastructure and Time: Apropros Anticipation and Adaptation” in Quaderns 262: “Parainfrastructures”, 2011, p. 50.
[5] Elizabeth Grosz. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth”, 2008.
[6] Grosz, p.12.
[7] “Editorial: Parainfrastructures” in Quaderns 262: “Parainfrastructures”, 2011, p. 1.