INFRASTRUCTURAL URBANISM - by Stan Allen

In the late sixties and early seventies, architecture shifted towards a semiotic approach. It carried out the meaning and representation instead of maximizing its attention to the architecture’s instrumentality and functionality. The meaning have been contaminated and wrongfully articulated in architecture, which in a way created a competition with artists, painter and others. Architecture is more than a representation of meaning, but the connection of the meaning and function.
“An opportunity to improve human condition” now it is conceived as “an opportunity to express human condition”
By Robin Evans
I agree with the quote above, because I believe the importance of the functionality of a concept has been lost and somehow replaced by its looks that are believed to represent an expression. Both Function and abstraction of meaning should work hand in hand in order to make a workable and enjoyable structure.
Stan Allen articulates in his reading that Infrastructural Urbanism have many things to offer towards architecture. Infrastructural Urbanism understands architecture as a motion of working with varieties of items and not only depending to the meaning of these items. It is a new approach to structure the city of the future. It has the ability to bring architecture to a material practice, which instrumentally works with the material by manipulating it. It transforms the material into a realistic object with the usage of abstract techniques. In architecture and Urbanism, technique is disciplined as a whole. Social and technical techniques are combined; with the recognition that social comes before the technical approach.
There are different approaches towards Infrastructural Urbanism, which the result would establish a workable system.