Buildings as Infrastructure

This research seminar expands the definition of infrastructure beyond roads, pipes, and cables to include buildings and their urban context. Like traditional infrastructure, buildings participate in processes that transport and transform both resources and human bodies. Through this participation process, buildings are made active agents in larger networks of political power, social relations, and environmental conditions. However, this agency often hides in plain sight, lying latent and undeclared in the organization of space. In this seminar, I made that agency visible through research, diagramming, and mapping practices. Once visualized, we will then speculate on how our findings might give
architects' tools for intervention and impact. This iterative process of inquiry, drawing, and discovery defamiliarized how I look at buildings and equip them with methods to engage pressing issues like environmental inequality, contemporary governance, and access to basic resources.