Infrastructure: it's meanings and methodologies

Stan Allen's Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City is my crucial reading for getting this project off the ground. Actually it has been my reading for a while now (actually I picked up that landscape ecology diagram used in our ArchCon project from this text, it is originally from this book and credited to Richard T.T. Foreman, I just requested it from the library on recall).

The book cronicles his work through the 1990's in the development of infrastructural urbanism. This can be understood in a way as a precursor or perhaps correlary to landscape urbanism, especially considering that Allen is/(was?) James Corner's partner in Field Operations.

His writing and drawings begin to form an understanding of infrastructure that is crucial to the formation of a successful project for this competition.

In his project for Barcelona, Logistical Activities Zone is particularly helpful in that it the project, though developed through traditional represenational strategies (plan, sections, models) is represented finally as a manual, in the form of a matrix of interconnected topics (surface, service, organization, structure, repetition, anticipation). Primary to this mode of represenation is the understanding of notation and scoring as a necessary means of representing the potentials of the infrastructural field.

Kahn's flow diagram for his traffic plan for Philadelphia, a particularly amazing project which is far understudied, is an early example of what notational represenation may accomplish. Further afield one may look toward the notion of scoring, as in music or dance, particularly the non-traditional scoring methods of Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Of course for urban landscape architecture this is old hat, see Lawrence Halprin's tome RSVP. Notations use in urban design allows for the production of "directed indeterminancy" wherein robust and specific proposals sustain overtime yet are open to supporting multiple interpretations.

hmmm... sorry I'm wandering here and I'm hungry for dinner. Since this is an informal thing I'm going to jot my notes on what I meant to write about: which is the specific meaning and intention of infrastructure as an architectural method. I'll flush it out later and fix this post rather than saving it an forgetting about it.

Infrastructure:
-establish realistic framework for future collective contribution
-constructing the site itself, preparing the ground for future building, conditions for future events.
via: surface, service, networks
Infrastructures medium is geography [it's method is choreography?]

"Traditional represenation presumes stable objects & fixed subjects."
The contemporary city is not an artifact.

Infrastructure - collective nature not the establishment of rules but the fixing of points of service, access & structure.

Infrastructure works strategically, but encourages tactical improvisation.

Infrastructure accomodates local contigencies while maintaining overall continuity.

catastrophe point - threshold at which continuitie's structure and function of a system is easily altered or broken.