Idiosyncratic Infrastructure

The design of infrastructure and its component parts is dominated by standards, codes and conventions that are intended to enhance efficiency, safety and feasibility, cemented in a repository of proven knowledge that is above all normative. At the same time infrastructural objects are always grounded in complex pre-existing realities, produced by contradictory desires, and often influenced by conflicting agencies. The customized intersection of standards, codes and conventions with the specificities, resistances and opportunities of a real terrain has produced often clever, inventive, and imaginative solutions. These “idiosyncratic” solutions have however often remained off the radar, and do not prominently contribute to the body of knowledge of infrastructure design, mainly because of being too specific and difficult to categorize.

The publication, made in collaboration with TU Delft’s Deltas, Infrastructures & Mobility Initiative (DIMI), intends to remedy this knowledge gap, by collecting, representing and categorizing pieces of infrastructures. Analysing the specific circumstances conditioning these artifacts, investigating modes of representation specific to infrastructure, and focusing on the very "thingness" of the infrastructural artifact, will eventually result in a catalogue of “idiosyncratic infrastructures”.

Facts

TU Delft researchers:                

Ir. Filip Geerts
Giacomo Rizzi

Project partners

TU Delft Deltas, Infrastructures & Mobility Initiative 

Contact

Ir. Filip Geerts