THE RESURGENCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE

        

The possibilities that infrastructure provides has the potential to bring back the machine aesthetic. In Allen’s article, he describes it as "a moment in which the technical and the aesthetic formed a unified whole." In a different way, it is the same discussion of form and function. Allen creates an interesting timeline driven by national and international events. The Cold War kept the "modernist dream of an integration of technology and aesthetics was no longer believable." Wartime economies created “spaces of production” that focused on efficiency. This period focused on material concrete processes and the passage of information. He then goes on to say "a postmodern culture of abstract signs and surfaces without depth." It also includes a rediscovery and reappropriation of the past (which often leads to loss in depth). As Allen explains, this means that architecture moves from being driven by organization to surfaces.

         These historical changes can be seen in the architecture. "If the factory floor is the ideal space of early modernism, then the museum is the emblematic space post-modernity." As “postmodernism responded not only to a call to re-inscribe architecture into history, it also responded to a contemporary demand for meaning in architecture.” It is this search for meaning that has led to architecture being a form of critique. What is particularly interesting to me is Allen’s hypothesis that “architecture has surrendered its capacity to imagine, to propose or to construct alternative realities. As Robin Evans has remarked, a building was once 'an opportunity to improve the human condition,' now it is conceived as 'an opportunity to express the human condition.' architecture is understood as a discursive system that expresses, critiques, or makes apparent the hard realities of a world that is held safely at arm's length."

         As other medias have become more ubiquitous, architecture needs to return to its ability to “transform reality” because it is falling behind in its ability to critique as well as other medias. Infrastructure has the ability to bring back the practical and organizational aspects of architecture. It will immediately insert architects again into the real world, and they will no longer be able to “[retreat] from questions of function, implementation, technique, finance, and material practice.” This allows for “architecture's instrumentality can be reconceived--not as a mark of modernity's demand for efficient implementation, but as the site of architecture's contact with the complexity of the real." Architecture again becomes material and “an activity that works in and among the world of things and not exclusively with meaning and image...concrete proposals and realistic strategies of implementation and not distanced commentary or critique.” Maybe yet again, architects will be able to contribute to the organization of the city and architects will not continue to “[participate] in their own marginalization.”