Infrastructural Imaginaries: Between Design, Nature and Politics

The course looks at a series of built and speculative case studies by architects, landscape architects, civil engineers, policy makers, and urban designers, to better understand how design operates within infrastructural systems. Case studies focus on the ways infrastructure shapes the built environment through, for example, the mediation of resources including water, waste, and energy. The course is particularly interested in investigating—and potentially developing—a heuristics of infrastructure, i.e. ways we might engage it as designers through, for example, its aesthetic dimensions and systematic qualities.