MAGAZINE ARQ 60 infrastructure Architecture

Readings | Works and Project | Essays and Documents

Multi-mobility, multispeed cities:
a challenge for architects, town planners and politicians / François Ascher

The building of a new highway, a tunnel, a new access road to the city, or a bigger airport usually arouses public interest and opinion. Infrastructure, backed by engineering studies, figures and graphics, engages the public and the media, who do not question the (not always clear) relationship between infrastructure and quality of life.
As multidisciplinary teamwork becomes ever more essential, the architects’ contribution to infrastructure issues is still diffuse. Only relevant, and eloquent, interventions will reveal the value Architecture can add to these works, which arise as a precise response to a concrete need.

Puerto railway station, Valparaíso, Chile / Murtinho y asociados
Revision of some public transport policies has led to the renewal of urban and inter-city railway systems. Valparaíso’s regional metro, currently undergoing improvements with lines being taken underground, upgraded rolling stock and stations, must deal with conflicting priorities, between recovering the coastline and maintaining the railway track that restricts its relationship with the city. The intervention of the Puerto station could well articulate the poles.

Warehouse in Lampa, Chile / Mario Carreño, Piera Sartori
The project as infrastructure could be rooted in a kind of vague altruism, which makes Architecture an explicit yet open solution, looking first at the large scale issues and from there dealing with the specifics. This emphasis, stressing the space for diverse and dynamic activities and renouncing form as origin, could provide the link between bridge, aqueduct, open plan and hangar-like spaces.

Urban highways , Santiago, Chile / Proyectos Corporativos. Text: Alex Brahm
The concessions system for urban highways has changed the way we move about the city and relate to it, and has also produced new programs and issues for Architecture, with administrative and supervisory centers, emergency services or monitoring booths. Part service centers, part corporate image, these buildings have blended into our vision of the city. Can they have a positive impact on the urban landscape?

Warehouse and shed, Coquimbo, Chile / Martín Alonso, Daniel Rosenberg
These projects highlight the value of designing a construction strategy, allowing the creation of form rather than predefining it. On this occasion what is interesting is a strategy that resorts to conventional, almost primitive, techniques, elements and procedures, yet these articulate in ways that are both extraordinary and relevant.

Barrel factory , Santiago, Chile / Martín Hurtado
What contribution can we architects make on the infrastructure issue? Leaving aside the problem of expression, perhaps we can offer a careful look at the behavior of materials and their durability, that balances the relationship between the activities sheltered by the space and its constructed covering.

Dongtan orban development, Shanghai, China / Arup. Text: Alejandro Gutiérrez
Sustainability issues are inevitable in town planning, to the point that today they are bargaining tools for real estate sales staff and regulatory agencies. But mitigation is giving way to new, more complex concepts and as yet unknown implications. The first experiments are already under way, with an urban scale action that transforms design-generated energy-saving conditions into a tradable commodity.

Urban highways concessions / Margarita Greene, Rodrigo Mora
If there were a model drivers’ city, it would undoubtedly be the reference point for the interventions in Santiago in the past 30 years. Leaving aside the relatively isolated case of the subway, vast areas of land have been given over to road traffic. Concession roads mark the formalization of a class system among drivers that will, unfortunately, inform the way we understand and experience the city.

Estoril road junction / Ricardo Abuauad, Tomás Milnes
Building architecture –and the city, by a process of association– is like a choral work that also involves large investments and long terms. How can these variables be managed to overcome the innate rigidity of the building and the dynamism of what it houses? Public works are at the heart of this tension between needs, terms and investments, but have their own emphasis: participation, and the common good.

Paradero 14: peripheral areas and infrastructure / Luis Valenzuela
Infrastructure as the matrix for urban development is a concept that offers a different point of entry to the planning issue. Implementing some types of infrastructure can offer more information for future development, and have more impact on it, than some regulations or subsidies, as the changes at the edges of our cities show. The idea of infrastructure can be explicitly related to surplus value, real estate development, value added and urban expansion.

Urban design for ravaged areas / Carla Urbina
Much of the relationship among citizens is sustained by public works (in terms of transport, communication and exchange), and they can also resolve the relationship between the city and its location. Ever less a matter of domination, the relationship should become a kind of dialogue, structured by roads, ditches, canals and drains.

Urban structure and greenery in Mendoza / Fabián Bochaca
A characteristic of Mendoza’s environment is the combination of a basic irrigation system, dating back to the first pre-Colombian vegetable gardens and its tree-lined streets. In a basically dry climate, urban tree planting was crucial to appropriating the public space, creating a new condition in the city that also had an impact on the social behavior of its citizens.

Centennial waterworks / Fernando Pérez Oyarzun, José Rosas, Luis Valenzuela
The city’s infrastructure has many angles, some more obvious than others. Mobility and communication are as central to today’s debate as the city’s relationship to water (rain, drinking water and sewage), was in the past. A review of public works carried out a century ago reveals some unexpected impacts among the functional initiatives that, probably unintentionally, have nourished and protected some qualities of our urban landscape.