3 minute read
on site review 41 : infrastructure
Stephanie White
Just as we sent out our call for articles for this issue, Routledge's magisterial Handbook on Infrastructure Designs: Global Views from Architectural History, edited by Joseph Heathcott, was published. He sent me the introduction in which he outlines infrastructure in an expanded field: 'not only the immediate artifacts of infrastructure - the dams, bridges, water pipes, fibre optic cables - but also the materials of which they are composed, the processes that produce them, the labour that animates them, the human affects that they reflect and engender, the landscapes and ecologies that they transform and the stories within which they are enmeshed. '
'Rather than view infrastructure as a taken-for-granted element of modernity, this volume approaches infrastructure through Bruno Latour's assertion that modernity is itself a multiform narrative. Infrastructure, then, consititutes a historically contingent element in the construction and dissemination not of modernity, but of the story of modernity – that contradictory knot of dreams, aspirations, and values that shape how we narrate the world.'1
I re-read Rosalind Krauss's 1979 essay 'Sculpture in the expanded field', written as epistemological categories were losing all definition: she warned that the new was being critically historicised rather than being recognised as a true break with past movements. 2 Sculpture, in the 1970s, was borrowing from architecture, agriculture and mining; land art was one result – for example, Nancy Holt's concrete culverts in the desert, aligned with movements of the sun, were both ancient and modern – fragments of infrastructural materials as sculptural as stone. Land art did not aestheticise infrastructure as much as borrow its inherent grandeur while politically undermining it. We realise, forty years on, that the seemingly a-political, un-commodifiable and critically innocent materials of infrastructure are actually deeply implicated in political and cultural processes.
2 Rosalind Krauss. 'Sculpture in the Expanded Field' October Vol. 8, pp. 30-44 Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1979
Infrastructure Designs: Global Views from Architectural History tells the back-stories of dams, power stations, roads and canals. Projects are described by narratives that expand and expand to reveal the sheer complexity of any infrastructural act which literally and figuratively encompasses the world.
Which leads us to our present startled dismay at how easily vital infrastructure with all its history, connections and inter-dependencies, can be demolished by eight well-placed HIMAR shells: Antonivskyi Bridge across the Dnipró in Kherson: broken, irreparable.
And the targeting of housing blocks: empty shells, service infrastructure blasted to bits. One way to decide whether something is infrastructure rather than structure, or metaphor, or a narrative, is to think of one's world without it. Infrastructure, no matter what its story, is the essential, little thought-of facilitator of habitus.3 Without infrastructure, we have nothing.
3 Pierre Bourdieu. Habitus and Field: General Sociology, Volume 2. Lectures at the College de France 1982-1983. Cambridge, Oxford, Boston, New York: Polity Press, 2020
