ALD4107H 
Instructor: Aleksandr Bierig

Infrastructures are conduits; they carry physical things like water, people, commodities, energy, and waste. Today, we think of infrastructures as immense and omnipresent. To call something “infrastructural” can refer to almost any underpinning of modern society. 

Despite this background quality, however, infrastructures are anything but neutral. Pipes, wires, and roads also carry beliefs about how the world should work and for whom it should function, designs that fix into place ideas about commercial circulation, social care, political representation, spatial organization, and economic development. This course will provide a thematic overview of the constructed networks that support the modern built environment, while simultaneously considering the social, spatial, and aesthetic implications of these encompassing systems. Through a historical survey of critical sites—the road, the bridge, the sewer, the mine, and the grid, among others—we will gain a sense of where these systems came from and how they have shaped expectations about our changing relationship with the natural environment. 

In other words, we will look behind commonplace understandings of infrastructure and search for episodes within a longer history of infrastructural formation. We will examine when and why certain infrastructures emerged. This is, therefore, an episodic history that will jump between sites and scales, shuttling between plans for a public transportation network in 1980s Paris, a heroic canal construction in 1890s Panama, and imaginary roads projected through 1690s England, among many other examples. 

Through the examination of a series of sites and case studies, the course aims to ask larger questions of infrastructure as objects of design. Who was it that dreamed up our infrastructural world? In whose utopia do we now live? Against the immensity and omnipresence of infrastructural systems, we will proceed through a series of archetypal historical agents who have speculatively imagined, deliberately designed, or tried to understand infrastructures: the engineer, the architect, the planner, the technocrat, the economist, the anthropologist, the bureaucrat, and the historian.

Image Caption 
Bernd and Hilla Becher (German, active 1959-2007)
Duisburg-Bruckhausen, Ruhr Region, Germany.
1999. Gelatin silver print. 
Bernd & Hilla Becher Archive, Cologne.