It took a lecture and a face to face meet to make me realize what's so great about BLDG BLOG. It's obvious once it's spelled out, but it seems like one of the primary aspects of Geoff's work is the bringing of all this other stuff: geology, climate, science fiction, infrastructure - all these larger scale systems - bringing all of them back under the purview of art and culture. It's an act of projective interpretation, to read agency and authorship into earthquakes, asteroids, and overpasses. The great thing about BLDG BLOG is that it's so rarely about BLDGs, but the voice and the perspective come from a way of looking at the world that's essentially architectural: simultaneously aesthetic, cultural, and functional.
Geoff points out a few things when asked about this: that anthropologists have been looking at material culture in these terms for a very long time, and that there's a lot of work out there, in the schools and the built world, that invokes architectural design at a higher order systems level. Consider the most recent wave of fascination architects have had with energy, economics, politics, and logistics.
It makes me wonder whether there won't eventually exist a complete discipline related to the creation of this kind of work. Call it Infratecture: the creation of very large scale sytems that operate simultaneously in the realms of culture and engineering, with the explicit acknowledgement that the nature of peoples interactions with these sytems is at least as emotional as it is functional.
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3 comments:
I definitely concur with your sentiment on the beauty of BLDGBLOG. For a site that is set up to discuss building, like you say, it is much more expansive and interesting due to the thoughtfulness of context and culture woven into the discussion. Much like Pruned which is a site about landscape that is often about much more.
I was also struck by your coining of Infratecture as "...the creation of very large scale sytems that operate simultaneously in the realms of culture and engineering, with the explicit acknowledgement that the nature of peoples interactions with these sytems is at least as emotional as it is functional."
For some this is new - for others investigating themes of more expansive holistic design, landscape urbanism principles, and ecological planning that is simultaneously natural, cultural, and temporal - we consider that profession could be rightly called Landscape Architecture - if you are willing to think beyond the traditional sense of LAs as exterior decorators.
Jason King
Landscape+Urbanism
Oh definitely, Landscape Architects are engaging with large scale structures in ways that few other professions have even thought about. And much of what architects have learned about this kind of engagement comes from people like Alan Berger, James Corner, and other LAs.
But even for LArchs, this latest turn away from the picturesque and towards the operational is a relatively recent one. And besides that, there are other types of systems (the space shuttle, the stock market, the global supply chains) that are as outside the limits of Landscape Architecture as they are from Built Architecture. This is the kind of stuff we should all start playing with.
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