Stan Allen Essay
Stan Allen in his essay criticizes the idea of the modern architect’s role. Hs goes into explaining how today’s postwar modernism consists of shallow images and expressions. In contrast to the imaginative and self indulgent task to create a singular unit of one’s expression, Allen values the development of infrastructure. Architects now assert that signs and information are more important than infrastructure.
Architects have now be phased out of the development of the city. Through their work of self expression architects have retreated largely from functionality, and material practice. And although it may be difficult to reverse the perception there is now of an architect in order to be involved with the development of infrastructure, the can rethink their own ingenuity and technical knowledge towards issues of infrastructure. This would mean going beyond stylistic or formal issues. Infrastructural urbanism creates a new way to practice and a new way to look at architecture’s potential to build the new city. Infrastructural urbanism transforms architecture into material practice. It is architecture that existing to propose real proposals and strategies of implementation.
Stan Allen then goes further to explain the responsibilities of rethinking infrastructure. Infrastructure being a material practice, It concerns itself with the morphology of large scale assemblages over time, not working with meaning but performance. Material practice is more concerned with how things work more so than what they look like. However, it is not limited to the manipulation of given material. Infrastructure works more with the site than architecture which concentrates on the building that goes on it. It prepares the land for future events dealing with division, allocation, and the construction of surfaces. And although they are static in themselves, infrastructures organize complex systems of flow, movement and exchange.
Allen sees infrastructures as artificial ecologies. He explains that it can manage energies and recourses making it similar to a habitat. How they can develop the things needed to respond to changes, recourses and overall changing conditions.