Europe is home to cases such as fragments of aqueducts that serve as street façades or viaducts that function as market roofs. Reviewing the role of infrastructures from unprejudiced urban and architectural perspectives allows us to rethink them beyond their original objectives.
Through a collection of case studies on intersections between elevated linear infrastructures and the architectures of the European sedimented city, this contribution presents ongoing research in the form of an open atlas. It focuses on extreme and contrasted encounters between infrastructures and the city as a resource for rethinking built heritage. In these places, contrast is inherent, as are tensions in urban and architectural forms. These tensions reveal the convergence of complexities among various dimensions and disciplines, while the relationship between architectural and infrastructural space plays a defining role.
Such encounters have been addressed in works like “The Architectures of Transit” (Barr, 2019) and “De Cosas Urbanas” (de Solà-Morales, 2008). However, in the doctoral thesis Encounters with Infrastructure, they are organized and studied at different depths, through specific protocols. Presenting a wide range of categorizations based on spatial conditions, this atlas opens a repertoire of topological situations. It outlines the relationship between the autonomy of infrastructures—understood as matter that moves other matter (Larkin, 2013)—and the implications of subjugation from their passage through specific contexts—understood as matter traversed by infrastructure.
The aim is to present a critical perspective on selected cases, to discuss the urban and architectural role of these spaces and how to approach them through design. Using historical data, drawings, and fieldwork photographs, this collection highlights their potential to reconsider spatial impacts, rethinking and recycling from a contemporary perspective that sees infrastructures as more than technical systems.
Bibliography
- Barr, S. (2019). The Architecture of Transit. Hartman Books.
- Larkin, B. R. (2013). The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327-343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522
- de Solà Morales, M. (2008). De cosas urbanas. Gustavo Gili.
