Foundations 19 – Infrastructure Space

Infrastructure space is often not filled by cast-iron economic logics but by very powerful habits and fictions.

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Keller Easterling

If architects and designers want to play a role in infrastructure space in the future, they need to learn which controls and but- tons to use in which situations. The trick is to see the difference between what is being said and what is being done – but also to adopt a different way of thinking: “It’s not about always knowing the right answer; it’s about knowing how to navigate a river,” explains Keller Easterling: “It’s not so much about knowing what, but more about knowing how.” She cited Savannah, Georgia as an example. In the 18 th century the city planners drew up a growth protocol rather than a master plan for the city. Nobody knew how the city would look over time – but it was predetermined how the individual elements of the protocol should interact. A prototypical ideal case that has led to a highly-attractive city today. To illustrate how important it is to acquire a toolset that allows one to act within infrastructure space and respond to new challenges, Keller Easterling named the current refugee crisis. Although infra- structure space has streamlined the movement of tens of millions of tourists, laborers and products around the world, when five or six million people must be moved away from global atrocities, an unsolvable problem arises. The countries have merely a dumb on- off button to grant or deny citizenship or asylum, and the human aid organizations in many cases seem to lack a spirit of innovation. The architect concluded with a provocative and intriguing possibility: “What if, in addition to our buildings, we left behind a kind of code or shorthand in infrastructure space – by designing linkages that can be established like software and updated over time?”

How does Infrastructure Space affect the building materials industry? “A construction company is a cross-pollinating organization that takes a certain kind of glass or concrete detail and repeats it around the world. That’s exactly the kind of thing we’re trying to do: find a multiplier.”

Keller Easterling is Associate Professor of Architecture at Yale University in Connecticut, USA and an architect, urbanist, and writer. She studied architecture at Princeton University and has taught architectural design and history at Parsons The New School for Design, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University. She was a co-author of “Poreform: Water absorptive surface and subterranean basin, Las Vegas, NV, USA” – a water absorptive surface and subterranean basin that captures rain runoff and adds over 75,000 megaliters (20 billion gallons) to the city’s water supply capacity. The project won the LafargeHolcim Award Gold 2014 for North America. Her books include “Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space,” in which she examines global infra- structure networks as a medium of polity.

Everybody in this room works hard to make responsible, reasonable decisions, but reasonable innovations can easily be outmaneuvered by unreasonable politics.

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