hybridized urban infrastructures (Lincoln NE)

Hybridized Urban Infrastructures was an inter-university design studio that critically engaged performative aspects of the urban-scape and used The Machine as a generative metaphor for infrastructure design. With growing concern for aging tunnels and bridges and a desire to stimulate economic growth and job production, infrastructure has long been an issue of interest in US domestic policy and a requirement for the sustained inhabitation of urban environments. While cognizant of these cultural forces, this cooperative design studio addressed the transformative potential of pivoting architecture students to infrastructural design problems, and the demonstrated needs of urban dwellers through next-generation infrastructure design.

The Hybridized Urban Infrastructures project was an act of radical collaboration.

This studio was co-developed and offered by Chris Ford (formerly University of Nebraska) and Ted Shelton (University of Tennessee) following their learning of one another’s infrastructure research during a conference in La Coruna, Spain. It shared a common set of assignments organized around field trips to both Lincoln NE and Knoxville TN. These trips enabled visits to significant infrastructure assets, exposure to guest lecturers, ideation through a conjoined charette, and yielded research deliverables with conjoined authorship. Student projects engaged the question of how infrastructure facilitates urban dwelling with proposals yielding two or more types of resource units through design hybridization from the infrastructural sectors of Agriculture, Energy, Transportation, Waste, or Water.

This conjoined studio offered the curricular opportunity to bridge funded research action with the promotion and discussion of urban infrastructure issues in larger architecture discourse. Within the (16) week semester, studio assignments included 1.) Engaging the Essence, 2.) Meta-Matics, and 3.) HUIs: Hybridized Urban Infrastructures, for sites in Lincoln NE and Knoxville TN.

Guest jurors for this work included Linda C Samuels (now Washington University in St Louis, WPA 2.0), Katrina Stoll (Infrastructure as Architecture), and Mason White (University of Toronto, Lateral Office).