What impact do infrastructures have on architecture and urbanism? This conference of graduate student work will contextualize architecture and urbanism within infrastructure, tracking the ways that large technological and bureaucratic systems are made manifest. Too often architecture and urbanism are analyzed apart from the larger systems of administration and technology that enmesh them. Infrastructure’s Domain will study the morphology of those systems—the forms and designs of fixed installations including industries, institutions, and distribution capabilities that serve society as a whole—to better theorize the spatial implications of infrastructure. How might we read architecture and urbanism within infrastructure’s domain?
A graduate student conference organized by Joy Knoblauch and Sara Stevens.
Friday 23 October:
6pm, Brainwork, Michael Osman, UCLA.
Saturday 24 October:
9:30am, Panel I: Sovereignty.
Infrastructure’s Medium Is Territory (Trans-Arabian Pipeline), Rania Ghosn, Harvard / Bridge Infrastructure as Transnational Space: Two Danish Projects, Iben Falconer, Yale / The Moscow Metro: A Site of Radical Metamorphosis, Tijana Vujosevic, MIT.
12:30pm, Panel II: Administration.
Police Science: Prolegomena to a History of the Discourse on Infrastructure, Cesare Birignani, Columbia / “Good Roads Make Good Men”: Object Lessons in the Making of Expert Legitimacy, Fallon Samuels, Harvard / The Shipping Container in the Era of Postmodern Globalization, Matthew Heins, Michigan.
2:45pm, Panel III: Architecture.
Airport Urbanism: The Urban Infrastructure of Global Mobility, Max Hirsh, Harvard / The Company and or as the City: Architecture at Philadelphia Electric, 1900-1930, Aaron Wunsch, Berkeley / The First Energy Crisis and the Modern Solar House, Daniel Barber, Columbia.
