Infrastructure is architecture on a broad spectrum. In this narrative, we go beyond the art of architectural physicality. Architecture is, after all, our everyday environment: how we experience and shape our lives. It encompasses the physical infrastructure – the buildings, roads, bridges, tunnels – and the mental structures that literally and figuratively sustain our world. In reality, infrastructure spans both aspects and is of fundamental importance to architecture, being symptomatic of the state of our society. Infrastructure is an incoherent collection of transcendent places, connecting us, moving us, and both shaping and reflecting our culture. Infrastructure represents places of arrival and future... Care to philosophise with me?
When we look at a building, we see a physical manifestation of ideas, shaped by materials and organised into a structure that can be both functional and aesthetic. On a small scale, we see how life wraps around this structure. Visibly, a corporeal poem emerges: light dancingly marks the time of day before our eyes. It indicates when we can open and close our eyes. It provides a setting against which we can dance, shout, argue, laugh... The structure organises the time of the home, the building, the built life. A materialisation of the rhythm of life.
We are exposed to a sensitivity to the delineated territory and the supra-physical relationships between us and the places we occupy or think we borrow the occupation of.
On a larger scale, think of a bridge or a motorway, the focus shifts. Infrastructure evolves into an interaction between the seemingly permanent and the transcendent of the domestic scale. The domestic points A and B – by which I mean primary destinations such as your home, workplace, places of family and friends – are projected as static destinations. The permanent gains importance, while the transcendent infrastructure in between disappears as a void in our conscious perception. Yet it is the void that gains significance: it is the void that shapes the socio-economic and cultural connection points of our society. Take, for example, the first cast iron bridge in the world: the Iron Bridge over the River Severn in Shropshire, Great Britain. This bridge was a technical marvel of its time and heralded the industrial age of large iron and steel structures like the Eiffel Tower or the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Progress, with its accompanying optimism, had arrived. Without this bridge, or rather the symbolism behind this bridge, we might not recognise the world as we know it today.
One moment it's here, the next it's gone. Just like the Orient Express gliding through a beautiful landscape. The void is metaphysical. The road is physically self-evident and mentally seemingly self-evident. A hundred years ago, taking a plane was almost unheard of. The view from a plane was invisible: birds don’t fly that high, and certainly not humans, until the miracle grew into mundane infrastructure. Now airports are (important) transit places. The arrival of your identity and entity into a (different?) society. An arrival. An arrival with a different socio-economic future. Air travel has made globalisation possible. A generic unification? Thankfully not. Airports as transit places. You feel the space: the space of the possibilities of being. The excitement of flying for the first time in billions of years on our blue planet.
Furthermore, infrastructure is a stimulating springboard out of the mental impasse imposed by the social class system. A contradiction? Give it some social perspective. For my location, the best reference is: accessible social housing. For people in Croatia, in Dubrovnik, it’s the recently built bridge that connects the peninsula to the mainland. I let you do the critical thinking.
In conclusion: destinations are linked by metaphysical voids that form the core of our emotional appropriation of the experience of space. The embodiment of the void is the dynamism of architecture on the broad spectrum.
~Ar. Kimberly Wouters
Epilogue
The digital is a bridge. The Iron Bridge of today for the art of shaping our daily lives: we are squatters in this metaverse world, working with found objects to borrow spatial occupation. A nod to the Silosophy project in my academic portfolio.
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