This simple, thoughtful phrase is the opening sequence of Cédric Klapisch’s Paris. In the same way these characters “discover” and wonder about the omniprescence of infrastructure in our cities, reading the latest issue of Quaderns (Parainfrastructures) brings this urban layer to the attention of architects, habitually “sidelined from this action framework.” The contributors to the issue propose a trajectory that points to the fact that, from the early twentieth century, certain architects proposed the creation of mobile infrastructures, with an ephemeral presence in physical space, such as the GATPAC’s “Ciudad del Reposo” project for Barcelona (1931) [2]. Towards the end of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, avant-garde architects proposed similar approaches, relying on inflatable structures, or, as José Miguel de Prada Poole would say, “inflastructures”.

Nevertheless, economic and urban growth for the past hundred years have revealed a practically invasive presence of infrastructure. The dream that inflastructures could solve problems such as poverty, social exclusion and delinquency was only left as a utopian vision of the future. In his book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), Reyner Banham [3] writes about the relationship between architecture and infrastructure by referencing the way its inhabitants coexist with the fragments that make up the city on a daily basis. In this sense, it might be relevant to wonder about the relationship between infrastructure and time, as proposed by Javier García-German, and the way concepts such as obsolescence, urban ecology and parainfrastructures fit into our contemporary view of cities. In this sense, the question would be, can infrastructures be adaptable, mobile, and dynamic? As García-Germán states, we are more likely to find answers to this question once we are able to understand the functioning of our urban ecosystems. According to this view, anticipatory and adaptive strategies will contribute to our understanding of the relationship between architecture and time, and possibly allow for the reuse of obsolete infrastructures, according to the present time. Stan Allen [4] describes this well when he writes “it is important to think about the real and practical limits of interventions designed within the complex, changing dynamics of the contemporary city.”

“The ability of architects to transform moments within the web of infrastructure systems is an opportunity to rethink the invisible.”
- Katrna Stoll & Scott lloyd, Infrastructure as Architecture [5]

Today, various interesting proposals recover the idea of adaptable, mobile, dynamic infrastructures. One example is Paisajes Emergentes’ Airplot, un project that is basically a “critical utopia”, proposing blocking aerial route in an area near London’s Heathrow airport, reclaiming the right of residents to the air space above their properties, in contrast to the “brooding omnipresence in the sky” mentioned by Enrique Ramírez in his essay on Air Control.

David Gissen closes this issue of Quaderns with a text on infrastructure preservation, with the fundamental idea of transforming our understanding of infrastructure and history, through the work of curators, conservationists and historians—not engineers—and thus promote the recovery of existing infrastructures. Still, we think it is important that the concept of parainfrastructures doesn’t solely focus on physical and tectonic infrastructures. Our cities are full of complex invisible infrastructures for communications, information, and even more importantly, relations. The different forms of representing and understanding these networks would provide a point of departure for a more organic understanding of cities through their relational infrastructures.

Ethel Baraona Pohl
dpr-barcelona

[1] From “París” Cédric Klapisch, 2008
[2] GATCPAC, « Una ciutat de repòs per a Barcelona », Mirador, 5 novembre 1931, p. 7
[3] Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles. The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Londres: University of California Press (1971)
[4] Allen, Stan. From the Biological to the Geological. Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks. Jovis (2011)
[5] Scott Lloyd, Katrina Stoll. Infrastructure as Architecture: Designing Composite Networks. Jovis (2011) More information: infrastructureasarchitecture.com

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.

Some contributions explore -para in the sense of ‘analogous or parallel to, but separate from or going beyond, what is denoted by the root word.’ Not very dissimilar from para-church, or para-military, para-infrastructures could be described as existing parallel to, or outside, the sphere of the mainstream institution. If infrastructures are hard and fixed, such para-infrastructures explore aspects of infrastructure that are flexible, mutable, fleeting, inflatable, etc. By proposing to design from the margins, such viewpoints indirectly reinforce the essentialism of an “infrastructure” that remains immutable, outside of critical inquiry, at the center.

Another meaning of the prefix -para, imperative of parare to make ready, prepare, defend from, forms words with the sense “protection from.” Not very dissimilar from how a parasol or a parapluie protect us from sun and rain, a para-infrastructure in this respect could be the spatial strategy that protects us from the dominant discourse on infrastructure, or some infrastructuralism. John May’s “Infrastructuralism: The Pathology of Negative Externalities” most significantly represents this position. Infrastructuralism, as May elaborates, abstracts the systemic imperative of infrastructure by making visible only some moments while constantly abstracting waste and destruction. If Infrastructuralism reinforces the moral hegemony of negative externalities, then para-infrastructures move away from the managerial organization of space-time. By unfolding the “thick space” of the system, para-infrastructures is an invitation to inquire into how our social relations are organized and reproduced through infrastructures. Liberated from the obligation to propose an alternative, para-infrastructure can become a way of protecting from the pathology of negative externalities: it represents relationships, connections, effects, the diagram of infrastructure.

Rania Ghosn obtained her PhD from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is founding editor of the journalNew Geographies.