Infrastructure as Practice

I read an interesting article today, Infrastructure as practice by Annalisa Meyboom. Meyboom argued that to design infrastructure is to design a built form that can be generative and directive: it has the potential to create place and suggest future growth. Below is my interpretation of the article with relevant examples.

Paradigm definition: One that serves as a pattern or model or a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.

Exploring these alternative paradigms for transportation infrastructural design, the author looked at an architectural approach that architects take ‘negative’ design criteria and work them into positive attributes of the built form.

Rotterdam, Netherlands has a large scale water control infrastructure designed into the landscape.

-          Due to density of the population the water engineering infrastructure embedded in the landscape has been appropriated for other uses.

-      Infrastructure is designed into the public space with bicycle paths situated on top of the dykes. 

-      Dykes also function as a noise barrier, public seating, and sports facility.

-      Multifunctioning infrastructure having both public space and engineering functions benefits society. It encourages social interaction and physical activity while providing a greenway and a water noise control system.

“The success of the Rotterdam infrastructure illustrates the benefits that can arise from incorporating infrastructure into a completely designed landscape”

Arial View of Riverdyke, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment 

Bike pathways over dyke. Rotterdam, Netherlands. Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment 

Infrastructure, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment   

Section of landform, Rotterdam, Netherlands. Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment 

 

What to take from successful infrastructural landscapes:
 

-          To benefit the public space, the infrastructure must be fully integrated into the design of the built form. The design must place a similar value on both the infrastructure and the public space it serves.
 

-          The designer must understand the multiple conditions of the environment and its ecology in order to create such integrated work, and the political entities involved must be ready to adopt insights and interests which go beyond economics and efficiencies.

As the public becomes more aware of the environmental and land use issues of stressed urban areas, the government bodies are pressured into taking action in considering the issues of public space and ecology in infrastructural design.

Firms such as West 8, Field operations and Foreign Office Architects represent examples of this integrative approach and the developing paradigm of alternative practice. “By taking the infrastructure requirements as a part of an overall design package.”

West 8 in their Playa de Palma master planning for Mallorca even went so far as to provide branding for the project which included a light rail transit system (LRT) and bicycle infrastructure.

 

West 8’s branding for Playa de Palma, Mallorca. Image by West 8

 

Branding included light rail transit system. Image by West 8

  

 

“I believe that in cases where there are limited resources for design, a concentration on infrastructure moves us further towards a liveable, vital environment, and sets the stage for future projects.” 

 

The design of large scale infrastructure should be approached with methods that consider programming, history of the site, and physical interaction of infrastructure of the body, in addition to viewscapes, experiential aspects, and the environment as a space both for recreation and a resource to be preserved.

 

“For infrastructure construction, it may be a revolution in action and yet it is ‘just architecture’ applied at a different scale and with a different programmatic content.”

DESIGN APPROCHES

Fixed spatial determinations of infrastructure typologies include clearance envelopes and property lines. Others, such as vertical alignments or interactions between streams, are flexible and pose various considerations.

The primary difference when considering the design of space for transportation modes as opposed to the design of space for occupation is that the programmatic elements are pathways and not destinations. These pathways contain moving elements for cyclists, cars, and subway trains that can be thought of as streams.

At certain locations, modes of transport might meet, making the consideration of interaction in transportation design a critical element of the design approach.

The need to layer programmatic elements is a common aspect in the urban environment. Due to physical constraints on the ground level, transportation will be stacked vertically relative to, and over, the existing transportation networks.

Infrastructural layering also allows for links to be made in directions other than along the horizontal axis of an existing infrastructure.

East Don Subway Crossing designed by Infrastructure Studio shows that the new subway / roadway bridge allows for the passage of people and wildlife under the transportation streams.

The sectional nature of layered infrastructure involves structure and space but also speed.

  “The experience of a city today is not so much the orderly progression of scales as an experience in rapid shifts in scale and speed of movement.”

Different modes of travel create different scales of perception. Considering this interplay between large and small scale, West 8 in their project at Eastern Sheldt Storm Surge Barrier in the Netherlands designed an experience for the space of the highway.

The shells you see in the photo perform and ecological function as a camouflage for dark and light birds but also provide a visual element for the highway landscape. It utilises different perceptions of scale, the finer-grained element of the shell to create a larger-scale pattern.

 

West 8’s Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier design works at a scale suitable to highway speed, but composed of smaller scale shells which also function ecologically as camouflage.  Image by West 8

Strategies and approaches like this can be adapted to different speeds and experiences as they relate to different streams of transport.

Movement is what defines the experience of transportation. The speed of the system that synchronizes this movement is a critical design component in design infrastructure.

Designers must ask themselves:
‘Where does the speed drop and what occurs there?
How can we manipulate the speed of the transport modes and how do these different speeds register architectural input?

‘A given speed should not always be assumed; it, too, can be designed.’

Infrastructure can be spatially configured to allow traffic flow to produce an event as well as a node or a crossing.

This strategy can be seen in the entry to the historic village of Thornhill, Canada. Traffic lane widths were narrowed in order to reduce speed, which provided a pause in traffic flow and a signification of scale change suitable to the scale of the historic village.
 

East Don River Crossing. Image by York region Rapid Transit Corporation
 

The programmatic intent for the subway stream is related to experience: the crossing of East Don is marked in the subway tunnel by providing a view of the golf courses and daylight in to the subway cars. But as the subway only rises at a particular stage making the view possible, the calculation of time relative to the speed of the subway train and the distance of the span of the bridge determined the view period and played into the configuration of the structure to provide the longest view possible.
 

‘The designer of infrastructure looks to the future to inform design by envisioning future growth, providing pre-connections, pre-conditions, and anticipatory adaptability to changing conditions.’

Infrastructure must anticipate stages ahead, responding to the unseen future with a present built form, owing to its inherent nature as a base from which other development grows.

 

Model of Central Valley Greenway Bridge. Image by  Patkau Architects

Riders on the Central Valley Greenway Overpass. Vancouver, Canada. Photo by Transit Link Vancouver.

Central Valley Greenway Bridge by Patkau Architects and Declan Engineers in Burnaby, British Columbia situated in a landscape of infrastructure—a green corridor for cyclists, a Sky train station, two roadways, and a railway co-exist. The site divides a protected green scape and an industrial grey scape, dealing with each both experientially and by form. However, the bridge’s position is primarily for the future because the city anticipates it will become the centrepiece of an urban village.

‘The need to consider future conditions give infrastructure design an affinity with landscape architecture because the future morphology of the site is a major factor in the design, yet out of control of the designer.'

Stan Allen comments, ‘The designer creates the conditions under which entirely different and perhaps unanticipated spatial characteristics may emerge from the interplay between designed element and the indeterminate events of the future.’

Design explorations that speculate upon future conditions are valuable since infrastructure appears to be a constant, unchanging and stable factor in the landscape.

An image of a future configuration can give life and possibility to a new paradigm of infrastructure which challenges the status quo of the existing, frequently super-sized, and often unquestioned monofunctional infrastructural state.

Rendering of the speculative Superway infrastructure above Granville Street in Vancouver, newly built and anticipating future growth and connection. Image by  Infrastructure Studio

Rendering of the Superway shopping district, second level of infrastructure, multiplying the existing Robson Street in Vancouver by providing a new level. Image by  Infrastructure Studio

 

The Superway is one such speculation by Infrastructure Studio. The planning model is based on the townhouse and podium typology. This typology results in a new but unconnected landscape at the fourth floor level above the ground plane of Vancouver. The Superway is a speculative greenway that generates a new landscape at another elevation. The greenway provides connection to these landscapes and to the current rooflines of the shopping districts, currently zoned below four floors.

An architectural practice in transportation infrastructure provides solutions to current needs for infrastructure and demonstrates alternative approaches that actively seek to promote successful public space and a positive ecological impact while providing the transportation arteries required for a healthy city.

The Superway is an idealized form of infrastructure that connects bikeways, sidewalks, greenways, parks, places for shopping, places for leisure, playgrounds, terraces, gyms, transit, cultural attractions, the seawall, and of course viewing locations. It generates a new level of interaction and anticipates the growth that will occur at this new level (Figures 11–14). Speculation on future options challenges the current acceptance of infrastructure by looking at what could be, and opens up the shape of the city to a whole new range of choices that might not otherwise be considered.

 Without these idealized investigations of what could be beneficial in infrastructure, it is not yet possible to solve the dilemmas of infrastructure or recognize the potentially negative ways it can impact the city.

I contend that the powerful design strategies that architects employ are both critically needed and hugely valuable to transportation infrastructure design: architecture at the scale of the city.