The Poetics of Infrastructures

Erik Wegerhoff 

Infrastructure buildings are, within the history of architecture, the grand unknown. Of immeasurable scale, costly, often debated, and yet fundamental for the functioning of society, they play but a side part in the historiography of architecture, seemingly escaping its grasp not least because they escape architecture’s conventional terms and modes of representation such as floor plan or elevation. In certain art forms, however, infrastructural buildings have come to determine entire genres, most famously the road novel and the road movie. The project starts from this discrepancy, investigating what fiction, photography, film, illustrations, and music have to say about infrastructures. A particular focus lies on the perspectives of users, aspects of wrong use, of failure, and of decay, challenging a commonly prevailing interpretation of infrastructures as instruments of power and from the viewpoint of their contracting authorities. The eventual intention is to build up, and find funding for, a larger, long-term, interdisciplinary research project.