The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles - Softcover

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53 ratings by Goodreads

9788496954793: The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 849695479X ISBN 13: 9788496954793

Publisher: Actar, 2009

Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support its urban plans, subordinating architecture to its own purposes. This out-of-control but networked world is increasingly organized by flows of objects and information. Static structures avoid being superfluous by joining this system as temporary containers for people, objects, and capital. This provocative collection of photography, essays, and maps looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city and affecting change through architecture. A project by the Network Architecture Lab and the LA Forum for Architecture & Urban Design featuring: Lane Barden, Barry Lehrman, David Fletcher, Steve Rowell, Sean Dockray, Fiona Whitton, Frank Ruchala, Matt Coolidge, CLUI, Warren Techentin, Ted Kane, Rick Miller, Roger Sherman, Deborah Richmond, Robert Sumrell. Kazys Varnelis, directs the Network Architecture Lab (Columbia Univer

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About the Author:

A project by Network Architecture Lab in collaboration with the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Kazys Varnelis teaches at Columbia University (New York).

Review:

"With funding now in sight, [The Infrastructural City] reminds us of the unseen physical pieces and a designer's role...The timing could hardly be better for The Infrastrucural City ... A doggedly detailed guide to Los Angeles as a physical thing." --The LA TIMES

"The outcome of four years research on the changing conditions of infrastructure in Los Angeles, this book is a fascinating excavation of the unique workings of the largest city on the West Coast, but one that illuminates conditions found elsewhere." --ARCHIDOSE

"The Infrastructural City will drive you way beyond Los Angeles. The idiosyncrasies, stories and lessons described are thought-provoking enough to make you look at your own city with a more inquisitive eye..." --We Make Money Not Art

"As commissions continue to elude practitioners during the current global economic malaise, architects and urban planners may be left wondering where they went wrong. The Infrastructural City will help them." --Tropolism

"A worthy compendium of invaluable theoretical and practical concepts, and a highly recommended contribution to college and professional architectural studies libraries." --Midwest Book Review

"The Infrastructural City argues convincingly that the layering of transportation, communications, hydrologic and power systems atop one another and atop a semi-arid terrain is giving rise to new hybridized or mutated social-environmental-technological dynamics that are unique and robust and deserving of serious critical reflection....The collection's various maps, diagrams and photographs clear, precise and cross-referenced -- underscore its potential for such covert operations, and perhaps for more mainstream and touristic agendas as well --itineraries for the 21st-century metropolitan flaneur." --Design Observer

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