Postpolitical Infrastructures

2014-11-18T10:27:00-05:00

The architect today is no ‘fountainhead.’ It is rather sad to watch today’s ‘starchitects’, designing their weird-looking signature buildings. These seem now always to be either museums or condos for billionaires. The brand-name architect just build useless luxury housing for the 1% and their trinkets. The actual design of the world is now in the hands of other people.

McKenzie Wark pens a rather a wake up call of a book review on Easterling's new book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space in which Easterling offers a set of subsidiary metaphors for contemporary infrastructure design: multipliers, switches, and topologies.

"The multipliers include: cars, elevators, mobile phones. The first, the car, was the multiplier that made possible one of the precursor forms of the greenfields city, the greenfields suburb. But “Levittown was simple software.” (74) Its repeated unit-forms were few. Sadly, it may be the case that the United States never quite acquired the higher-order practices of building forms at the next scale. Hence the endless attempts to solve spatial problems with yet more versions of the Levittown software.

The switch is something like an interchange highway. The switch is a macro-order feature compared to the multiplier, shaping where the multipliers can circulate. Topology might designate the art of patterning switches and ...

Editor's Picks #262

2012-04-30T19:48:00-04:00

Archinect had the opportunity to speak with Tadao Ando. Check out the Interview: 20 Minutes with a Master. b3tadine[sutures] was so inspired that he posted three times and archaalto wrote "I sometimes imagine that millions of years from now when another intelligent species excavates the earth they find the ruins of Louis Kahn's and Tadao Ando's buildings, and maybe they'll think we had some grace and weren't just accidents waiting to happen.."

Archinect (including Orhan, Alex, Kaori and Paul) had the opportunity to speak with Tadao Ando during Ando's brief visit to Los Angeles to collect his 2012 Richard Neutra Award. Check out the Interview: 20 Minutes with a Master. I especially liked the final exchange wherein Ando revealed "As we all know, you can't make architecture by yourself. An architect needs to make everyone take ownership for the work. To be successful, you need to ensure that every carpenter, plumber, and so on, in every project, is doing their own project. Every time I go to the construction site, I try to take a photograph of every worker. It's a symbol that we're all working together with a shared goal. It's very important for me that everyone feels that way" b3tadine[sutures] was so inspired that he posted three times and archaalto wrote "I sometimes imagine that millions of years from now when another intelligent species excavates the earth they find the ruins of Louis Kahn's and Tadao Ando's building...

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Postpolitical Infrastructures

Editor's Picks #262