MEDITATIONS ON INFRASTRUCTURE

MEDITATIONS ON INFRASTRUCTURE

For this issue we asked writers for a short take on “infrastructure,” interpreted in the broadest sense and on any scale. These mini pieces seek out unconventional notions of infrastructure—of living space, computer chips, subterranean city-scapes, and knowledge production—offering new perspectives on the constructed worlds around us.

Lingering in the Subway

A look at the New York City subway’s tiling

I distinctly remember when I descended into Astor Place station. As the skyscrapers of Manhattan gave way to that musty, yellow glow of the subway, I began to see something new—a beaver plaque that adorned the walls of the platform. It was nothing impressive, but I could not help marveling at the way the beaver stood on its legs with its little claws wrapped around a tree branch, surrounded by a cornice with a decorative flower pattern, a style I had seen so often yet never had the words to describe. There was something touching about the ability of such architecture to submerge itself beneath the conscious gaze of the typical subway rider and reveal itself only when explicitly looked for.

Earlier that day, I had stumbled across a book at the Strand that described the work of Philip Ashforth Coppola, who made it his lifetime goal to draw the New York City Subway. What does it mean to draw the subway? To draw, to record, and to immortalize the decorative tiles that filled the stations of the subway system. This deliberate choice to draw rather than photograph, to replicate by hand rather than by camera, forces the observer to see all the details. But as the reader, I was struck not only by Coppola’s drawings but also by the sheer amount of detail around me I had never thought to observe. Flipping through the book, I realized that a new world—one of history, ruins, design, and art—was revealing itself to me. When one actively looks for these subway tiles, they are everywhere, and yet they were never hidden from us in the first place. The hidden is revealed to us, and we begin to closely read and listen to the language of the underground.

The beginnings of the New York subway system in the late 1890s coincided with a larger philosophy in urban planning known as the City Beautiful movement, which held that beautification of the city would inspire virtue in its inhabitants. As part of the city’s infrastructure, the subway was intended to be not only a feat of public transportation but also an exhibit of the city’s grandeur. Such grandeur was reflected in the decor of stations—most stations had a banal uniformity to them, but the various mosaic tiling and plaques gave each station its individual beauty.

The city is full of signs and symbols for us to read. From the obvious and everyday Helvetica black and white signs that signal the stations and directions we wish to go (34 Street-Penn Station, Downtown & Brooklyn A/C) to the more concealed yet visible (the colorful tiling of Canal Street, the intricate ornamentation of Bleecker Street). We look toward the black and white signs to guide ourselves through the subway, and in our haste to find our way, we overlook the more detailed decoration of the stations: we do not observe the detailed ornamentation, we are not aware of the history that surrounds the tiling, and we do not fully appreciate the decorative individuality of each station.

What is revealed in such observations is not simply an aesthetic appreciation of the city, but an understanding and awareness of its various layers. The subway is like the city’s respiratory system: people flutter in and out, dashing through turnstiles and rushing up and down stairs. As people move about the city, it changes. Layers are added, removed, filled in, erased as time passes, and the subway system sheds and grows along with the rest of the city. The system of tiling, as a part of the city’s infrastructure, extends beyond a visual representation of the city’s material surface. Some tiles provide a direct indication of what lies above ground—the Alma Mater plaque at 116th Street—Columbia University station, the boat mosaics at the old South Ferry station—but the vast majority bear little resemblance to what exists above ground. And yet, could we not say that they serve as another form of infrastructure, a self-contained system that exists, guides, and signifies something separate from the larger system around it? They create a visual world underground, connected to, but not strictly reflective, of the world above. The tiles may provide some sort of aesthetic function in the subway system, but they contain so much more—a collection of images that speaks its own language.

ERIC GUO B’23 is still wandering beneath the city.

Beakers and Bushes

The culture of inquiry

My third-grade science fair is seared in my memory—the dehydrated potatoes and the white tri-fold board covered in bright sharpie detailing the scientific method. I recall the desire to win. Some of that desire came from my mother, a science teacher, who had sown a love of science in me. The scientific method, as taught to children, can be described in four steps: forming a hypothesis, experimentally testing it, recording observations, and drawing conclusions from the results. My mother, eager to help me understand a complex topic in the way a third-grader could, suggested that I conduct a biology lab she had done with her

students. The experiment examined the effect of immersing a potato in salt water—observing osmosis. I was baffled—how could an eight-yearold carry out such a complicated experiment? As she explained the experiment further, I dropped my head to the dining table, struggling to even understand the words she was saying.

As scary as the project seemed, I did not want to pass up the opportunity to spend time working on it with my mom. I initially pictured the potato as a water balloon, hypothesizing that it would grow in salt water. After planning and conducting the experiment, my hypothesis was wrong! The potato shrunk. Despite that, my project was successful because I followed the four steps: I made my hypothesis and tested it, placing the potatoes in covered beakers for varying amounts of time and measuring their sizes to answer how they changed in salt water. I came to understand that science isn’t about proving oneself right, but having appropriate methods to understand the experimental question and result.

As my mom taught me to approach the world through conventional science experiments, I spent my summers and holidays with my family in Jamaica’s mountains, learning about nature through direct encounters. I remember going on walks with my mother where the air smelled of fallen mangoes, mint leaves, and rain. She would point out certain leaves and bushes and explain that they were made into teas because they had healing and protective properties for fevers, stomach aches, and even heart health. I questioned how she could know that without research or evidence. She looked at me and sighed, joking that I needed to spend more time in Jamaica. Despite her scientific background and love of research, she had been taught and sought to teach me many things that were known through our familial or cultural knowledge.

My mother enjoyed learning; there were things she had learned through textbooks, but there were also things she had learned from her grandmother, who had learned from hers. She explained that my family had used these natural remedies for generations and that, while they had not tested it scientifically, their knowledge was shown correct through experience. She reminded me of the time I caught a fever. She rushed to the bushes in the back of our home and picked cerasee leaves, the key ingredient in a tea my family had used to cure colds, fevers, and aches for as long as she could remember. “Here,” she said, handing me a cup of bitter tea masked by honey, “this will make you feel better.” The next morning, my fever felt considerably better, just as it had the other times my mother had treated my ailments with cerasee tea. With this reminder, my mother had once again left me dumbfounded, wondering how to learn and know things, this time not through a science experiment. Growing up in two cultures with dichotomous approaches to exploration forced me to face the fact that there is no one correct way to know.

MAKIEDA MCKENZIE B’25 is crying over midterms.

Forging Swords

The human side of chip manufacturing and production as statecraft

In July 2022, Congress passed the CHIPS Act, a $50 billion effort to support domestic computer chip research and manufacturing. Hailed as the federal government’s largest direct investment into a strategic industry in recent memory, the act aims to decrease reliance on East Asian countries, which produce 75% of global chip supply and host four of the top five chip manufacturing sites. Though many major design firms are U.S.-based, almost two-thirds of the world’s advanced computer chips are made in Taiwan.

This position in the trade ecosystem gives Taiwan significant power as an export nation, but places it at the center of war games between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China. Per Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, this expansion thus represents a chance to not only expand American manufacturing and R&D, but also shore up “national security.”

But “national security” evokes weaponry, military budgets. What does it mean here?

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A Three Kingdoms period (220-280 C.E.) legend, recounted by Emperor Cao Pi, tells of a bronzesmith commissioned to forge a sword from celestial metal birthed by the empress, a sword meant to save the empire from invasion. On the sword’s delivery, the emperor, fearing the skilled smith might make weapons for other rulers, has him executed.

What are the weapons in this story? The sword—itself a ‘son’ of the emperor. The knowledge of forging—how to hone newborn material into something dangerous. The argument that ‘invaders’ are coming—a claim that makes any injustice, even murder, imperial defense.

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What, in computing, is worth killing for? With chips as the basis of nations’ digital infrastructures—powering the smart phones and computers that run economies and controlling the drones and server rooms that run military operations—their sites of production hold significant geopolitical value.

“Site of production” suggests mastery over material, a place where identical products pop out of a perfectly controlled assembly line and exist only for use. With computer chips, none of these connotations may hold. For one, the material limitations of chip manufacturing mean craftsmen navigate uncertainty through the design process. Designers make the ‘brains,’ considering different architectures that trade off power consumption, speed, and chip size. Verification engineers simulate the chip in all possible scenarios—mistakes in hardware are permanent and costly. Engineers translate the design into transistors, finding layouts that are physically possible and fast enough to work at all potential manufacturing variations and operating temperatures.

The production process also requires significant human attention, and each step is so delicate that any dust in the environment could permanently damage chips’ capacity. Workers at 24/7 fabrication sites first refine raw silicon into a pure crystal and cut it into thin round wafers to be made into tens or hundreds of chips. Then, workers operating extra-UV lithography machines etch design features as small as three nanometers into the wafers. Due to the number of times this etching process must be repeated, a batch of chips takes months to complete. Even after intense environmental regulation, humans have so little control over chip quality that the chips’ final processing speed still varies immensely.

Thus, though we might imagine computers as fungible, each computer’s chips are unique. And though we might overlook the awe-inspiring work that goes into them, it is work— human work. Beyond the harping on supply chains, inflation, U.S./PRC conflict—conflicts over chips are conflicts over knowledge, with thousands of skilled workers caught in their wake.

If we read into the internalizing of a “strategic industry” as “national defense,” as Raimondo says, the CHIPS Act’s reshuffling of workers’ livelihoods thus becomes a soft deployment, each worker part of a never-ending war.

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Cao Pi’s legendary bronzesmith left behind two other weapons after death: a twin sword made from the excess celestial metal and a newborn son to wield it. As a man, the son does just that: claims the twin sword, unseats the emperor, and avenges his father.

A 1926 rewrite of this story by Lu Xun, the ‘father’ of modern Chinese literature, plays up this manpower/weaponry meld. His descriptions of the son—who “burn[s] red-hot” and runs “cold as ice”—and the stranger who helps him—cold and thin as an “iron rake”—evoke swords in a forge, ‘swords’ who ultimately sacrifice themselves to complete the mission.

This retelling could be a nationalist call to arms, in which two men battle a system that makes weapons of us all. But published a year before the escalation of Kuomintang/CCP tensions in a China still hamstrung by decades of unequal trade with Western nations, this story might also take aim at any state’s weaponization of its people—the people who fuel its industries and fight its wars—as the father weaponizes his son. After all, in Lu Xun’s version, succeeding in the father’s mission means both individual heroes must die.

RYAN SILVERMAN B’23 is semi-conductive.

KATHERINE XIONG B’23’s laptops—and their makers—deserve more respect.

On Aluminum Buildings

Displacement, transmission, and contemporary architecture

Recently, I ventured for the first time into Sharpe House, a charming repurposed residence named after machinist and business leader Lucian Sharpe, who led the invention of the American Wire Gauge. This system now serves as the standard for determining the diameters of electrical wire.

Since Brown acquired Sharpe’s residence in 1920, the building and the neighboring Peter Green House have quartered Brown’s history department. The two buildings, the former dug up and relocated to adjoin the latter in 2018, are joined by two glass bridges attached to the exteriors of each, transforming the dormer windows

of Peter Green into a study nook. In granting new tactile access to this historical architecture, the renovations (designed by KITE Architects) indicate a reverence for historical infrastructure, a desire to innovate by illuminating and recontextualizing the past without erasing it.

Unfortunately, I grew uncomfortable sitting against shingles and relocated to the more traditional sofa situated on the bridge’s most sunlit section, where I was met with a grim sight that revealed the primary motives of the buildings’ unification. As I looked out through the window, my field of view was filled entirely by a single, windowless plane of grayish aluminum: I was staring at the north wall of the soon-to-be Lindemann Performing Arts Center (LPAC), conveniently placed on the former grounds of the Sharpe House.

Faced with an “extruded aluminum rainscreen” and a rectilinear structure, the Center appears much like an Apple storefront—or an Apple product. The new building will go on to accommodate a 625-seat auditorium, along with a handful of studio spaces. Brown claims the LPAC “is designed to inspire innovative new art-making” in the performing arts. The language of “new art-making” seems pointed quite precisely at digital creation, despite the building’s foundation in bodily art forms. Though the university has released few specifics of the building’s facilities, it seems fair to assume that a post-COVID building would come equipped with digital capture equipment to compress live experiences into electromagnetic currents on a circuit board and transmit them far beyond the walls of the auditorium.

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Since my initial encounter with the LPAC, I’ve considered how the building’s visual footprint signifies the oft-ignored material limits of information computation and transmission. Many felt the impending virtual world overtaking at the fastest rate during lockdowns, when firms swiftly relocated their operations from grand, high-resource office towers into humble laptops that could simulate a working environment from anywhere. This shift engendered a sense that our lives had almost wholly abstracted, the physical moved into the ethereal plane of the internet. In reality, the material operations, once palpably accessible, did not vanish out of thin air but were instead relocated to an AWS datacenter tucked far away in the woods of Washington.

Though our cognitive maps of digital economies, relationships, and art-making resemble immaterial webs stretched across the atmosphere, the LPAC faces us with the material antithesis. Perhaps the contradiction between the building’s futuristic look and its function for live, bodily performing arts, which we might call dated in the streaming age, is a move by KITE to confront the bodies of data transmission machines.

The question remains, however, of just how severely these bodies will transform the urban landscape, and how gracefully this new landscape will integrate the historical infrastructure that institutions like Brown hope to preserve. What historical traces will be washed away by this new landscape? Will infrastructure of transmission take precedence over the local experience?

Sharpe’s legacy feels bittersweet. Today we can admire his home and its history with a proximity like never before. From his windows we can look out at the realization of his invention. Unfortunately it’s a pretty shitty view.

JACKSON DELEA B’23 is moving his desk to his window.