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COUPLING

Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism

PAMPHLET ARCHITECTURE 30
INFRANET LAB / LATERAL OFFICE
Neeraj Bhatia / Maya Przybylski / Lola Sheppard / Mason White

Princeton Architectural Press, New York


Published by PAMPHLET ARCHITECTURE 30 Foreword 4
Charles Waldheim
Princeton Architectural Press
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Roads InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office
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Railway Keller Easterling
2010 Princeton Architectural Press
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Shipping
LAND RESERVATIONS 24
Bridges

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify Tunnels


owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected
in subsequent editions. Pipelines
RE-RIGGING 32
Editor: Becca Casbon Wind Energy
Designer: Fei-Ling Tseng/InfraNet Lab
The Architectural Reconstruction of Geography 42
Special thanks to: Geothermal Energy David Gissen
Nettie Aljian, Bree Anne Apperley, Sara Bader, Nicola Bednarek,
Janet Behning, Megan Carey, Carina Cha, Tom Cho, Drinking Water
Penny (Yuen Pik) Chu, Carolyn Deuschle, Russell Fernandez, Pete Fitzpatrick, NEXT NORTH 46
Jan Haux, Linda Lee, Laurie Manfra, Tidal Energy
John Myers, Katharine Myers, Steve Royal,
Dan Simon, Andrew Stepanian, Jennifer Thompson, Paul Wagner, Joseph Weston, and Internet
Deb Wood of Princeton Architectural Press Kevin C. Lippert, publisher

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Submarine Cables WIRING RUNWAYS 56


TK
Server Farms

Landfills

ICELINK 66
Greenhouses

Aquaculture
Afterword: Figuring It Out 76
Agriculture Christopher Hight
Buoys
Acknowledgments 79

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FOREWORD
Charles Waldheim

This publication and the work of InfraNet Lab city. For the past two generations (at least), could reengage the aspirations of the modern doing, the work demands further consideration,
/ Lateral Office document the postmodern architects involved with the urban have project, while maintaining a position of and reminds the attentive reader of many
cooption of architecture as a metaphor identified infrastructure as a privileged way ambivalence regarding the neo-liberal flows of under-pursued potentials in the infrastructural
signifying complexity and synthesis in systems forward. This has had much to do with the fact globalization. This position proved prescient, approach to urbanism yet to be explored.
associated with business and information. that urban infrastructure has been repositioned as it has emerged among the most durable
Through the re-appropriation of architecture as a topic combining the potential for social strains of discourse on urban topics for over
in its metaphoric sense, the authors re-imagine and environmental progress, while avoiding the a quarter century. To this historical project, Charles Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor and Chair of
Landscape Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School
the disciplinary and professional commitments blind alleys and dark corners of urban form. InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office has added a
of Design.
of capital A Architecture to include the nimble programmatic array and an abiding
traditional externalities of social, environmental, By postponing the question of urban form, concern for ecological contexts, inputs, and
and various other mediated contents. In so proponents of an infrastructural approach to the outcomes. More recently, that discourse has
doing, InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office mobilizes architecture of the city suggest that a focus on been reabsorbed into contemporary debates
infrastructure as site and subject of their performance criteria, operational imperatives, around urban design, planning, and landscape
opening up of architecture to previously and contemporary flows might allow us architecture. For the urban arts, infrastructure
external conditions. Through infrastructure, to reengage with social and environmental has signified a myth of eternal return, wherein
InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office seeks to subjects without participating in the culture planners and urban designers might regain
reanimate architectural discourse with urban wars of the past. In this family tree, one would lost market share and relevance. For landscape
(read social and environmental) relevance. comfortably place the previous generation architects (and landscape urbanists), a focus on
Equally, they seek to capture a broader of postmodern urbanists, particularly those infrastructure promised to return the field to
audience for architectural production, aspiring trained in Europe with a taste for American its historic sense of centrality, and as a riposte
to move the field from its cultural confines into theory (Koolhaas, Wall, Mostafavi, Zaero-Polo, to civil engineerings imperious attitude toward
the more quotidian qualities of daily life. Allen, Corner, et al.). For those, and others, the subject. Most recently, this line of work
infrastructure emerged as a topic with traction has informed the emergent understandings
In this aspiration, InfraNet Lab / Lateral as it afforded an instrumental and operational of landscape infrastructure and ecological
Office is not alone. Through this work, way forward for urbanization, while avoiding urbanism.
and the publication of this pamphlet, the what had become the twin cul-de-sacs of
authors propose themselves for membership historicism and typology. Notwithstanding the historic and contemporary
in a distinct genealogy of architects cum merits of such a project, the work of InfraNet
urbanists who see infrastructure as a means By postponing questions of form, the putative Lab / Lateral Office presented here avoids the
to reconciling architectures contemporary avant-garde architect urbanist of the late clichd naivet of much that stands for an
potential with its historic relationship to the 1970s and 1980s (not to say 1990s and 2000s) infrastructural approach to urbanism today. In so

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FORMATTING CONTINGENCY theory of organization. From this viewpoint,
external contingencies were considered to be
an equal associate in the design process, the
groups ambition of establishing a machine
constraints as well as opportunities that internal process that could work with unavailable or
InfraNet Lab / Lateral Office structures and processes responded to. At its missing information could be said to echo the
Negropontes initiation of the Architecture root, contingency theory suggests that managers contingencies associated with open-system
Machine Group, the precursor of the MIT should no longer privilege one best way to thinking. This suggested that data was neither
These are things we do not know we dont know.
Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002 Media Lab, and the publishing of economists organize. Given this, it follows that organization an absolute nor a static framework from which
Paul R. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorschs architecture should anticipate inevitable change. to respond; information was as much a living
Any environmental design task is characterized by an as-
landmark book, Organization and Environment: As competing methodologies of contingency system as any other. An array of architecture-
tounding amount of unavailable or indeterminate information.
Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine Managing Differentiation and Integration. planning emerged throughout the 1960s termed pursuits subsequently flourished:
and 1970s, systems thinking expanded to enterprise architecture, data architecture,
Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism include the idea of an open system, which application architecture, and information
Co-optings presents a body of work that seeks to continuously interacts with and adapts to its architecture, among others.
reintegrate architecture as a systems-based environment. In the natural sciences, an open
Computation and business theory both co- organization, as an activity within the broader system is permeable to both energy and mass. The term architecture as employed in the
opted a strand of meaning from the term globalized exchanges of economics, data, Military and disaster protocols fully embraced above examples catalyzed a shift from what
architecture in the 1960s to seed a radical ecologies, politics, and land usearchitecture contingency planning, to the point that a might be called a command-and-control
repositioning within their respective fields. after the superorganism. The work explores National Contingency Plan was devised in 1968 organization to an approach approximating
Architecture was used as a suffix, signifying the possibilities of how architecture might to anticipate hazardous substance releases, such real-time responsive organizationthe
at once organizational complexity and benefit from a reintroduction of the term as oil spills. transition from architecture as a static,
networked wholeness. It could be argued that architecture, as it has evolved within business, hierarchical enterprise to it operating as a
from this moment, the term architecture management, computation, and information The year 1967 also saw the establishment dynamic element, interacting within, and at
and the discipline of architecture began architecture practices. From this reintroduction, of the Architecture Machine Group at MIT. times structuring, networks. With newfound
evolving along separate routes. Business architecture has the capacity to operate as a Negroponte considered any design act to also vigor, the term introduced contingency into
architecture and information architecture, dynamic infrastructure within an increasingly be an act of procuring information, and thereby disciplines whose very foundations were
for example, adopted an architectural idiom complex and intertwined environment. declared that the group would be dedicated predominantly procedural. Could this be
to signify their complex economic conditions to the construction of a machine that can recuperated into architecture, the discipline?
and expanded data fields, today understood to Architecture After Contingency work with missing information.3 Managing
be spurred by globalizing forces. As the word contingencies that arose from problems of Contingency, as with design, is an anticipatory
took on varied meanings, it further came to Lawrence and Lorsch were both professors of missing information presented a rather different act, and is often devised as a response to
signifyoutside of its discipline propera organizational behavior at Harvard Business set of challenges in architecture. Negroponte an eventuality. Contingency triggers the
dynamic superorganism, capable of processing School at the time Organization and Environment was mainly interested in architect-machine recuperation of an extrinsic architecture.
disparate extrinsic matter.1 Systems thinking was published in 1967. The authors criticized symbiosis, and in a fluid discourse between The role of contingency in architecture
had also migrated into architecture through the then-common organization theory for the interface with machines, architects would permits opportunism at the moment when
the megastructure movement of buildings as ignoring relationships between the structural not need to be computation specialists. Artist architecture interacts with the complexity of
city systems, which reached a fever pitch in characteristics of complex organizations and the Peggy Weil, an early collaborator with the its wider environmentan environment often
the late 1960s. However, this early systems environmental conditions these organizations Architecture Machine Group, observed that possessing characteristics of a superorganism.
architecture typically focused on the internal face.2 In contrast, they sought an organization her work took place in an atmosphere of As with living organisms, the performance of
systems of the architectural object, and failed architecture that was more responsive to factors complete improvisation: using machines any organization depends on the alignment
to acknowledge the systems of environment from extrinsic forces, or the wider environment. and tools for reasons far afield from their and adaptability between the system and its
that envelop architecture. The year 1967 Extracting the unpredictability of the extrinsic original applications.4 While Negropontes environment. The filtering and selection of data
was witness to two notable co-optings of from the more predictable intrinsic factors, group primarily focused on establishing a from inevitably inadequate information sets, as
the term architecture as a system: Nicholas Lawrence and Lorsch proposed a contingency hybrid process that embraced a machine as Negroponte suggests, combined with Lawrence
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site-construction civic conduit
as a conduit, container, and surface within the Coupling employs interventions that also
landscape architecture landscape urbanism capacities of infrastructure. operate extrinsically, sometimes at a territorial
scale. Easily replaced or upgraded, these
axiomatic programmed What are these formats? Surfaces are planes infrastructures double as landscape life
marked sites productive
structures surface container of mediation, thickened and intelligent. support, creating new sites for production
Containers are shells of enclosure, processing and recreation. The ambition is to supplement
not-landscape not-architecture not-landscape not-urbanism and performing as nodes within a network. ecologies at risk rather than overhaul them. The
Conduits are carriers of matter and energy, following six design/research projects merge
sculpture infrastructure
exchanging and transferring within a larger landscape, urbanism, and architecture into a
network. Formats suggest an emergent mutant assemblage of surfaces, containers,
Sculpture in the Expanded Field, Rosalind Krauss, 1979 Infrastructure in the Expanded Field, InfraNet Lab, 2009 productive public realm, one in which and conduits. Existing landscapes meld with
performative processes are integral to emergent systems to catalyze a multivalent
and Lorschs observation of contingencies as the prejudices that distinguish architecture from occupation. Rather than each operating network for a new public realm. Seeking
opportunities, is central to the intentions of infrastructure, landscape, and urbanisminstead as a single format, the projects in Coupling opportunistic associations between economy,
the work included in Coupling. In the book, we relishing the dynamic ambiguity of a spatial exhibit varying combinations of formats: ecology, politics, and information, coupling is
ask: After the term architecture is absorbed format, or spatial product.5 conduits lined with containers (IceLink), not simply a combinatory exercise so much
back into the profession of architecture, what resurfaced containers networked by conduits as a typological investigation into new spatial
kind of architecture results? Much as Rosalind Krauss positioned and (Land Reservations), or containers lined with formats for the twenty-first century.
qualified sculpture practices in her essay intersecting surfaces (Wiring Runways).
Formats: Surfaces, Containers, and Conduits Sculpture and the Expanded Field some While one format typically serves as the 1. Although much of the theory of superorganisms is centered on the
thirty years ago, so too should infrastructure primary organizational device, other formats eusocial behavior of organisms, as best chronicled by sociobiologists
Designing for contingency has no prescribed be qualified in an expanded field today.6 Using absorb contingencies or account for missing Bert Hlldobler and E. O. Wilson in The Superorganism (W.W. Norton &
methodology in architecture, though a Klein group diagram, Krauss identified information. The projects and proposals take Company: New York, 2009), we use the term here to suggest a highly
certainly all architecture is already charged three subpractices of sculpture that had the position that infrastructures operate as interconnected set of environments, as well as the occupants of these
with anticipating possible eventualities previously been buried within a generalization contingent ecologies, or managed dynamic environments.
higher loading, inclement weather, potential of sculpture. She qualifies them as site- systems. Identifying their role and how they 2. Paul R. Lawrence and Jay W. Lorsch, Organization and Environment:
of fire, or even change of use. However, construction, marked sites, and axiomatic interrelate becomes an act of design coupling. Managing Differentiation and Integration (Boston, MA: Harvard Busi-
anticipated contingencies typically focus on structures. These three uncovered practices ness Press, 1967), v.
mitigation rather than opportunism. And an became disciplinary parallels to sculptural Coupling
3. Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine (Cambridge, MA:
architecture that responds to opportunities practices. Today, architecturepreviously
The MIT Press, 1970), 119.
of contingency is manifest in atypical spatial absorbed within Krausss groupis in need of The twentieth century was witness to both an
formats. Performing in a manner similar to qualifiers to establish its position among the infrastructure boom and bust. It is the twenty- 4. Accessed from http://www.lnkall.com/projects/archmacprojects.html

infrastructures, these spatial formats support expanding disciplinary terrain of landscape first century that will need to determine not on June 18, 2010.

energies, flows, resources, and matter, yielding architecture and urbanism. Toward this end, we only how to address crumbling and ineffective 5. Keller Easterling uses the term spatial product in reference to
an emergent multivalent public realm. Coupling suggest removing architecture from the original infrastructure, but also how to position new how the market uses the phrase real estate product. Both suggest
identifies three spatial formats in which a group and replacing it with urbanism, which is infrastructures that confront urgent issues of formulas for space prior to realization and construction.
contingent architecture might materialize: missing from Krausss original diagram. From climate change, sustenance inequality, and 6. See Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, October 8
surfaces, containers, and conduits. Each this new group we identify three subpractices environment degradation. The opportunity (Spring 1979): 3044.
format mediates between architecture and its of architecture from infrastructures expanded for projecting a future infrastructure lies
environment, between the biological and the field: productive surfaces, programmed in bundling multiple processes with spatial
infrastructural, the entrepreneurial and the containers, and civic conduits. Identifying experiences. The work in this book aims to
logicalsimultaneously performing the roles infrastructure in the expanded field reveals declare infrastructures as open systems, adaptive
of both. These formats enjoy an ignorance of new formats and operations for architecture and responsive to environments and occupation.
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