Infrastructure
In the late sixties, the practice of architecture began to reflect a semiotic approach. In Infrastructural Urbanism, Stan Allen argues that functionality and social technique are primal approaches to the current urbanism that should work in hand with abstraction and representation, a feeling Alex Wall seemingly relates to, yet differ in his description of “surface strategies” and their effects to the urban.
Stan Allen argues that the efficiency of the city and its meaningful aesthetic representation should work in hand. He critiques postmodernism and its ability to “express human condition” other than improve it. He believes that infrastructure is the new approach to structure the city. The practice of physical proper infrastructure should dictate the course of urbanism and functionality should surpass its abstract images. “Infrastructural work recognizes the collective nature of the city and allows for the participation of multiple authors.” This authors, architects, should implement this approach in public investments and civil works such as highways, railroads, or mass transit, hence expanding and unifying the infrastructural urbanism.
Alex Wall, despite his accordance to Allen’s perspective on infrastructure, believes that the landscape is a “functioning matrix of connective tissue.”Wall agrees that the infrastructure of the city dictates as well the progressive and implemented path of the urban, yet his description of infrastructure is physically different. He describes the strategies to these infrastructures through his “surface strategies” and how each individually develops and alters the landscape.
Both authors believe that infrastructure is the means to form the future of the urbanism. They believe in the qualities of function, implementation, technique, and material practice as strategies to redefine the landscape. Their theory of infrastructural urbanism, can be related to works such as Super Studios Supersurface 5 or Archigrams Plugin City, with even more contemporary works such as FOAs International Port Terminal. All these works relate to their idea of an infrastructure that extends and unifies the city as a whole while merging the urban to the landscape.