Foundations 19 – Infrastructure Space

The architect and urbanist Keller Easterling is convinced: Great untapped potential slumbers in infrastructure space. She says one reason this resource remains under- exploited is the cultural conditioning of architects, engineers, and designers. A notable aspect of the LafargeHolcim Forums is certainly the phrasing of the topics. The carefully chosen wording gives ample leeway for interpretation, associations, and debating fundamental issues. This was seen with the very first Forum on “Basic Needs,” and the phenomenon was even more pronounced with the most recent event: “Infrastructure Space” – a fascinatingly amorphous term! How much can be read into it and deduced from it! In fact, the participants of the 5 th International LafargeHolcim Forum developed their hypotheses on this subject with academic passion, among them keynote speaker Keller Easterling. Through her presentation, the American architect made the Forum partici- pants acutely aware of how big the gap is between the importance and the perception of infrastructure space. Although infrastructure shapes our everyday lives, we often do not see what belongs to it and how it works. This is probably a chief reason why infrastruc- ture space is “currently an underexploited medium of innovation,” as Keller Easterling assesses the situation. The architect says the potential is not being exhausted mainly because of our cultural conditioning: “Culture is well-rehearsed at pointing to things but under-rehearsed at describing the inter- activity or chemistry between things.” Designers, engineers, and architects are good at designing buildings and sites, but now they must also become good at recognizing relationships and creating dispositions in infrastructure space. The prerequisite is that they «

Infrastructure space is considered by many a by-product of laws, economet- rics, informatics, logistics, or global standards.

»

Infrastructure space is not just pipes and wires but a spatial operating system for shaping the city that’s like a rule set.

19