1985 Master of Architecture
A Study of Urban Infrastructure

I am interested in studying the ways in which elements of urban infrastructure can be integrated into the fabric of the industrialized American city. The cities in Europe provide many examples of how fortifications, aqueducts, dykes, bridges, and other difficult and atypical urban elements were reconciled with the predominant urban order. Such examples are likely to offer significant insights into how elevated highways, exit ramps, bridge piers, railway and subway lines, and flood control works could be better integrated into the cities of America. I am also interested in the institutions, rituals, and symbolic architectural devices that evolve around these infrastructural elements: the fountains and baths fed by the aqueducts of Rome, the urban rituals that take place on the riverwalls of the Seine, the windmills associated with the seawalls of the Netherlands; the devices that achieve the cultural as well as formal integration of these elements with the city.

I therefore propose a travel itinerary that would begin with a study of the ways in which elements of preindustrial urban infrastructure have been integrated into the fabric of mature, traditional cities and would conclude with a study of the analogous but unresolved problems of the American city.

The first part of the study would examine both how preindustrial elements such as aqueducts and fortifications were integrated into the city while they were in use, and how they have been dealt with in the centuries since they have become obsolete. These studies would focus on the city of Rome but would involve extended trips to document such elements as the following:

• the aqueducts of Istanbul and North Africa

• the repopulation of ancient theaters in Rome and Seville

• the fortifications of York, Lucca, Siena, Saint Paul de Vence, Avignon, Carcassonne

• the dykes and seawalls of the Netherlands

• the bridges of Bath and Florence

• the canals of Amsterdam and Venice

• the avalanche walls of Switzerland

• the rehabilitated flack towers of Vienna

• the riverwalls and embankments of London, Paris, Budapest, and Prague

Upon completing these studies, I would return to the United States where I would consider the architectural and cultural conditions surrounding analogous infrastructural elements in our own cities:

• the elevated rapid transit systems in Brooklyn and Chicago

• the two-level street system in central Chicago

• the abandoned, subterranean goods delivery system in central Chicago

• the subway concourses of Toronto and Montreal

• the second-floor skyway system in Minneapolis

• the bridge piers and approach ramps of Manhattan

• the urban levees and flood control works along the Mississippi

• the railway structures, subway systems, river tunnels, and elevated highway interchanges throughout the United States

Following these studies, I would proceed with the final portion of the project; I would produce proposals for specific infrastructural conditions in specific cities of America, but which address issues which are of broad significance. These proposals would deal with three cases: the colonization or reuse of an obsolete infrastructural element; the integration of an existing, operational element into the urban fabric; and the design of a new element of infrastructure being introduced into an existing urban situation. The following hypothetical projects are examples of the kind of problems that these proposals would examine:

• The section of lnterstate 95 which runs through downtown Boston. A project could study the alternative of colonizing or reusing all or part of this urban artifact as an alternative to demolishing it in the event that plans to relocate the highway underground proceed.

• The underground subway concourses in Toronto. These passageways have spread in a haphazard way between the centers of power and population in the downtown core. A series of elements that made the relationship between the rational, preconceived order of the surface and the medieval expediency of the subterranean city clear would serve to intensify the existing but unexpressed imagery of the city.

• The aqueducts currently being built to supply the rapidly growing cities of Arizona and New Mexico. A project could consider ways in which the importance of these structures to the continued vitality of these cities could be expressed.

With the insights gained from the study of infrastructural systems in Europe, these proposals would attempt the cultural as well as architectural reconciliation of these elements with the city. The proposals would attempt to explore the mythologies and rituals associated with the elements of infrastructure in order to give cultural and architectural legitimacy to their place in the city.

The results of this study—the documentation of infrastructural elements from the past and their relationship to the form and culture of the city, and the proposals for specific problems in the present—would form the contents of my final report.