Infrastructure quotes

"The operation of infrastructure disrupts the opposition between culture and nature, which posits landscape as an unbuilt, original condition upon which architecture, as part of culture, is built. Infrastructure is a built ground onto which a landscape, nature, is built. They [infrastructures] acquire the spatial and functional characteristics of the places onto which they are grafted. They [infrastructures] emerge as frame works for urban development.”

-- Berrizbeitia, Anita, and Linda Pollak. Inside Outside : Between Architecture and Landscape. Minneapolis: F & W Publications, Incorporated, 2003.




Infrastructures are flexible and anticipatory. They work with time and are open to change. By specifying what must be fixed and what is subject to change, they can be precise and indeterminate at the same time. They work through management and cultivation, changing slowly to adjust to shifting conditions. They do not progress toward a predetermined state (as with master planning strategies), but are always evolving within a loose envelope of constraints…. Infrastructure creates a directed field, where different architects and designers can contribute, but it sets technical and instrumental limits to their work. Infrastructure itself works strategically, but it encourages tactical improvisation.

--Stan Allen, INDEX Architecture, A Columbia Book of Architecture, 2003, p. 87