Urban Interstructure

When design practitioners cross disciplines, interesting things can happen.  In the 1970’s, architects started identifying themselves as urban designers because they love cities and felt that master planning fell within their design expertise.  The New York architecture firm of Rogers Marvel recently presented their work at the National Building Museum made up entirely of landscape architecture projects including their competition winning proposal for the redesign of the White House’s South Park.  While it sometimes seems that projects are awarded to the professionals who have the better design idea no matter their license type, it can also be beneficial for the expanded point of view crossing disciplines provides.

Infrastructure projects have received significant funding boosts under the current administration for two key reasons:  the work needs to be done, and such improvements advance national capabilities.  Hard infrastructure projects build roads, and provide water supply, sewers, electricity and telecommunications; elements that are only partially infrastructure.  The prefix ‘infra’ means ‘below’ or ‘underneath.’  These built objects are usually thought of as silently and invisibly serving other purposes.  For instance, roads facilitate mobility, water and waste piping free landowners from individual digging wells and having septic fields, and power lines support the information age, although they are hardly silent or invisible.  Some designers today are finding opportunities to express the function of this hard infrastructure in order to increase civic awareness and therefore appreciative stewardship, and this is found in storm-water management techniques such as open runnels and vegetated swales.  The systems that operate these projects are known as soft infrastructure, again neither silent nor invisible.  We need a new prefix.

Interstructure would imply a ‘between’ and ‘among’ relationship.  Given that these projects are built on publically-owned land and are funded with tax dollars, they have impact on our shared physical and organizational civic world, most keenly felt in cities.  Rather than an additive process where urban public space is filled up with stuff, why not a more integrated approach where all built elements needed to support community life were blended into one spatial and temporal realm.  This would include the hard inert elements and the living landscape.  Sticking trees in boxes located along streets where curb cuts have left a little space is the opposite approach to what we need.  If instead belts of trees, shrubs, flower gardens and plots to grow food could be woven between and among the buildings, just like the roads.  A simple correlation:  The greater the density of the “hard stuff,” the greater the concentration of the “living stuff” to insure the balance so often referred to as livability.  A good example is Michael Van Valkenburgh’s Teardrop Park in Battery Park City, New York.  To do this, urban designers, architects and landscape architects need to think collaboratively; that is, between and among their distinct disciplines.

Emerson could be our guide.  He said,

            Solitude is impractical and society fatal.

            We must keep our head in one and our hands in the other.