The term infrastructure is an ambiguous and drifting signifier. This ambiguity has led to several key challenges for scholars of the built environment. The first challenge has to do with the ambit of the word itself. Nineteenth-century French engineers coined the term to refer to the substrate of support for rail lines—the structure beneath the structure.1 The term spread through transatlantic and colonizing networks, particularly among civil engineers engaged in road building and water projects, as well as military officers concerned with defense works and territorial control. Gradually it came to refer not only to structures below, but also between—physical networks connecting one node or place to another in a system. Today, we regard infrastructure as both visible and invisible, below and between, material and immaterial. It is no longer just the packed gravel substrate under the train tracks, it is also the train tracks themselves, and it is the switches, signals, chronometers, sheds, rotundas, terminals, and operational standards that comprise the system of rail transit, and it is the bodies, social relations, and visions of the world remade by high velocity travel.2
[...]
Given that design is a fundamental human capacity, architecture, as the design of built form, is a practice broadly shared within and across cultures. In popular lexicon, architecture is often used to refer to unique, geospatially fixed buildings designed by professionally credentialed architects—the grand edifice, the monument, the iconographic structure. Likewise, definitions of architecture by architects tend to re-enforce their status as creative geniuses responsible for transcendent works of art. As Jay Pritzker famously declared, “architecture is intended to transcend the simple need for shelter and security by becoming an expression of artistry.”9 Such a definition implies that shelter and security are “simple needs,” rather than immensely complex and creative human endeavors, and that the development of human habitat is devoid of artistry unless it involves the work of an architect. While great monuments and edifices certainly count as expressions of architecture, architecture itself is not reducible to such objects; rather, it instantiates through generative practices of form making, temporal marking, and aesthetic expression grounded in human social relations. These practices unfold along continuum from professional to untrained, fixed to mobile, unique to repetitive, integral to modular and permanent to momentary. Architecture emerges from and reflects constant negotiation among people over the production of space, the terms of exchange, the vectors of mobility, and the making of lived worlds.10 The task of architectural history is to account for these negotiations over time, and the artifacts, spatial forms, and social relations that they engender.
Nevertheless, as Stephen Parcell has ably demonstrated, while
architecture changes over time, so do our definitions of what constitutes
architecture.11 In the mid-nineteenth century a powerful discourse took hold
around the notion that the locus of authority to design inheres in the
credentialed professional. This conceptualization of design as specialized
knowledge acquired through the rigors of training parallels the broader
emergence of institutional and discursive practices that codified expertise in
fields from medicine to public health, social welfare, education, civil
engineering, and planning. The professions gained organizational strength as
gatekeepers in the production of scarcity around knowledge, and as managers of
the complexity of a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing society.12 As such,
they not only served the interests of powerful state and market actors, but
also their own interests as a middling class, with narratives constructed to
justify their existence. And indeed, who does not want to traverse a bridge
designed by an engineer, or send their children to learn from a qualified teacher?
- Jospeh Heathcott
