11181 Landscape Architecture Studio 5: Infrastructures

Description

Infrastructure supports life. Water, transport and electricity are all examples of closed system infrastructure 'machines', designed and managed to operate as efficient, engineered networks traditionally acting as a 'life support' for urban development. But this kind of infrastructure has a downside: it's efficient rather than flexible, designed to support but not necessarily to engage with landscape or stimulate public life, and it focuses quite narrowly on the problem at hand, solving one problem while creating others along the way. And because it's often large scale and centrally controlled, the nuances of the local scale are often ignored.

Rather than an invisible infrastructure 'machine' with a single system focus, how can infrastructure be holistic, with a more productive relationship to the underlying land and the social and cultural life it is meant to support? This project explores landscape, its overlay of urban infrastructure and the potential unrealised productive interactions between them. Students are asked to engage at a local scale with a regional site via the tools and processes of landscape infrastructure with the aim of devising new hybrid infrastructures that are flexible, decentralised, multifunctional and catalytic in nature.