Landscape as Infrastructure | Infrastructure as Landscape

In beginning to explore the genre of this thesis, I find myself drawn to the concluding section of an essay I wrote in January 2009 for Charles Waldheim’s Fall 2008 semester course Ecology as Urbanism; Urbanism as Ecology. This term paper revisited Susan Nigra Snyder and Alex Wall’s 1998 Architectural Design article “Emerging Landscapes of Movement and Logistics,” and while it specifically addressed the logistics landscape, the observations apply equally well to infrastructure.

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Over the past decade, the field of landscape architecture has expanded beyond its traditional realm of gardens and parks to encompass in some dimension almost all horizontal surfaces that function as, in the words of Alex Wall, a “matrix of connective tissue that organizes not only objects and spaces but also the dynamic processes and events that move through them. This is landscape as active surface, structuring the conditions for new relationships and interactions among the things it supports” (Alex Wall, “Programming the Urban Surface,” Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 233). Nowhere is this clearer than in built up, highly engineered areas, such as cities and their attendant infrastructure.

[…Even as] design is inextricably linked with broader technological innovations and the zeitgeist, [… this] paper is extraordinarily timely (something that was not even perceived in October when it was begun) with the election of Obama and his promise to help rejuvenate the American economy, partially through infrastructure spending. This is generally understood to include roads, highways, bridges, rail, port facilities, national energy grids, clean energy production facilities, public buildings such as schools, broadband networks, etc.

Designers and planners such as Benton MacKaye, steeped in a prior period of rapid economic and technological growth in the 1920s analogous to the one that just ended, came into their own under a similar era of reevaluation and rebuilding. This past time, like the present era, called for innovative thinking, such as MacKaye’s approach of “liquid planning” where geometry was subordinated to the flexible needs of economy and efficiency (Keller Easterling, “Part 1,” Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 54).

Long before the recent changes in landscape and infrastructure scale that responded to globalization, “in 1927, MacKaye...proposed a new type of atlas...that [supported] not only the rearrangement of global infrastructure and transportation routes but also the formulation of new protocols for the economies of distribution among countries” (Easterling, 32). A few years later, a fellow Regional Planning Association of America thinker and possible coiner of the term “New Deal”, Stuart Chase wrote that “the American economy, with its wasteful land boom practices and severe depression” might require master planning “to bring purchasing power into alignment with the growth of the technical arts.... It means tinkering with the credit system, tinkering with wages, tinkering with hours of labor” (Easterling, 47-48).

This Keynesian language sounds similar to the discourse of current events. Obama’s call for federal infrastructure spending could arguably be traced back to a UVA planning and infrastructure conference in 1931 and FDR’s “presidential campaign, [when he] spoke of the need for an experiment in regional-national planning that might also generate employment” such as what would become the TVA (Easterling, 47-48).

Six, going on seven, decades later we find ourselves at a similar juncture with the promise of landscape and infrastructure, and we should therefore be mindful of the lessons of the past. […]The power of landscape to define these unique spaces and the modern day promise of infrastructure is well summarized by Chris Reed.

“While conceived as rational, absolute, and utilitarian, infrastructure has the capacity to be appropriated and transformed toward social, cultural, ecological, and artistic ends. [...A]rchitecture and landscape can appropriate the utility and serviceability of infrastructure. One could imagine landscape/architectural/urbanistic projects conceived as functional infrastructures, ecological machines that process and perform, public spaces that literally “work” [...] whose form is valued for its performative rather than sculptural characteristics” (Chris Reed, “Public Works Practice,” The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 282).

While the past century’s historical record sheds illumination on the intersection of landscape and (urban) infrastructure, it is clear that even after the passage of a decade, the theories presented in “Emerging Landscapes of Movement and Logistics” deserve further study. […]As landscape continues to rapidly adapt to changing economic climates and commercial/industrial innovations, projects that will be constructed in the coming years, whether with federal assistance or not, may provide the necessarily catalyst for discussion, much as the TVA […] did in [its] own time.