Infrastructure Space: Architectural Practice and Operational Logics in the 21st Century

AbstractThe purpose of this research is to study the intersection between 21st century architecture and infrastructure, understood as a physical fact as well as an abstract concept, through the notion of Infrastructure Space. Since the 1960s, the definition of infrastructure has been changed towards a conceptual version, moving among different disciplines, from Engineering to Humanities. At present, its material condition as an urban system is overwritten with its potentiality, as a transdisciplinary tool, which can explain economic, political, sociological and urban phenomena. Its double material-conceptual condition and its capacity to operate in multiple scales oblige us to expand once again the meaning of infrastructure, opening up to the concept of infrastructure space. This paper hypothesis relies on the fact that infrastructure space is a practical and theoretical device, extracted from infrastructural logics, which is consolidated as a design instrument in contemporary architecture. This new architecture seeks no longer to reproduce the infrastructural model but its logic. This allows us to apply them in the project with independence with respect to the scale and the program involved. To prove this, two concepts of infrastructure and infrastructure space will be postulated, which will be compared to several architectural works in order to show specific project strategies derived from this relation, resulting in infrastructure space.