Idiosyncratic Infrastructures II

Idiosyncratic Infrastructures II

The course intends to remedy a knowledge gap, by collecting, redrawing and categorising pieces of infrastructure. Analysing the specific circumstances conditioning these artefacts, investigating modes of representation specific to infrastructure, and focusing on the very "thingness" of the infrastructural artefact, will contribute to a catalogue of idiosyncratic infrastructures.

Infrastructure and its component parts are dominated by standards, codes and conventions that are intended to enhance efficiency, safety and feasibility, cemented in a repository of proven knowledge that is above all normative. At the same time infrastructural objects are always grounded in complex pre-existing realities, produced by contradictory desires, and often influenced by conflicting agencies. The customised intersection of standards, codes and conventions with the specificities, resistances and opportunities of a real terrain has produced often clever, inventive, and imaginative solutions. These idiosyncratic solutions have however often remained off the radar, and do not prominently contribute to the body of knowledge of infrastructure design, mainly because of being too specific and exceptional to categorise.

The course practises the inverse of integrated design striving to analytically unpack the multi-disciplinary synthesis of the highly-specialised architectural objects of infrastructure.

This BordersenTerritories elective takes existing infrastructure case-studies at the intersection of architecture, city and landscape, as the basis for a drawing and modelling experiment. Seminar-discussions on different representational conventions will feed the speculation towards a final exhibition/catalogue.