Advanced Option Studio: Reparative Infrastructures — Infrastructural Imagination and the Making of Publics
This studio delves into the rich lineage and histories of the "infrastructural imagination" within the discipline of architecture to speculate on new infrastructures in the climate emergency.
Candilis-Josic-Woods, Free University Berlin, 1963-73.
Understood normatively, infrastructure is the literal and figurative armature of modern civilization — the foundation upon which the contemporary city thrives or fails. Yet it remains paradoxically invisible, hidden underground or pushed to the city's periphery, surfacing in the public realm mainly when it fails. Today, aging infrastructural systems and the climate crisis intensify calls to reimagine infrastructure toward multivalent ecologically informed forms with deeper proximities to people and communities.
Given this background, this studio delves into the rich lineage and histories of the "infrastructural imagination" within the discipline of architecture to speculate on new infrastructures in the climate emergency. Simultaneously a rejection of architectural form-making as spectacle or the mono-functional legacies of infrastructure in civil engineering, the studio promotes a multivalent, synthetic approach to engage infrastructural imaginations.