The word infrastructure is rarely associated with beauty. ‘Infrastructure’ connotes a bureaucratic and unpleasant world, one that is riddled with the anxieties of contemporary urban life. The concrete structures that house our day to day lives become lost amidst blazing sirens and ceaseless streams of activity. The beauty in the world we’ve created is forgotten.
While infrastructure must serve a practical purpose, a locale’s appearance—whether shaped by concrete mazes or by glass skyscrapers—has a lasting impact on the area surrounding it and on the people who live there. As is seen in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Japan, the future of infrastructure demands an approach that integrates functionality with aesthetic beauty. Today’s developers and architects face a dilemma: should they sacrifice aesthetic beauty for functionality or create new designs that preserve past culture while meeting modern needs? For the sake of our communities and their welfare, modern infrastructure must use architectural artistry to preserve a city’s cultural past before it surrenders to modernist aesthetics, political agendas, or scaled-down budgets.
Los Angeles: Combining the Old with the New
A view of Olvera St. with Mexican flags lining the alleyway. The mayor’s office can be seen in the top right-hand corner.
Aging cities face the unique challenge of preserving infrastructure from past decades while developing modern structures that meet contemporary demands. Los Angeles is no exception. At the heart of downtown L.A. lies Olvera Street, one of the original alleyways created by Mexican settlers. Today, it is a thriving hub that celebrates Mexican culture, testifying to the influence of Mexican-Americans in the city. In short, Olvera Street is culture. “We need to value history,” David Salomon, professor of art history at Ithaca College, told the HPR. “Even if it costs more money, we need to retrofit. If it’s old buildings, one needs to be creative and flexible about what happens in them.”
In line with Salomon’s advice, Los Angeles has spearheaded projects to blend the new and the old. For example, Olvera Street is part of the El Pueblo de Los Angeles historical monument, a city-run organization aimed at preserving Mexican culture. Union Station, a hallmark of Art Deco design that lies adjacent to Olvera Street, has similarly been revitalized and repurposed by the city. In fact, Metropolitan Transit Authority officials are planning to preserve the historic space’s original appearance, while renovating its interior to include a retail center, new restaurants, and a complete remodel of the passenger concourse area.
While Olvera Street and Union Station retain Los Angeles’s Hispanic roots, new commercial developments are springing up around this hub of cultural life. From the Wilshire-Grand Center, a glass-paned, 73-story skyscraper, to the new federal courthouse, contemporary infrastructure projects are leaving their mark on Los Angeles. The translucent grey window panes of these new structures tower above the older infrastructure they surround, housing the beauty of the past in between the allure of the future.
The waiting room of Union Station, the famed art-deco train station that lies adjacent to Olvera Street.
Communities and developers have a responsibility to ensure that new infrastructure is functional while preserving the culture and history of an area. “These are monumental things that are in our everyday lives,” Salomon said. “Why would you consider an ugly, monstrous thing? It seems irresponsible to human beings.” Placing an emphasis on the aesthetics of modern infrastructure and blending it with pre-existing designs is becoming a necessity for older cities. Los Angeles shows that preserving historic infrastructure and combining it with contemporary design can produce a city that blends aesthetics with functionality, while meeting modern society’s needs.
Infrastructure and Community: Revitalizing the All-American City
A bus lined with vibrant graffiti art comes to a stop in a neighborhood filled with empty buildings and vacant lots. Tourists exit the bus while school-aged children file in. This bus is part of the Detroit Bus Company, one of many projects trying to reinvigorate Detroit’s economy through social and infrastructural development. With its fleet of brightly colored, repurposed school buses, the Detroit Bus Company generates revenue from tourists, which it then uses to bus students to school free of charge. The Bus Company shows how locally based infrastructure development has the capability to bring Detroit out of economic downturn.
An empty street lined by vacant buildings in Detroit’s Delray neighborhood.
At the height of the Great Recession, The Motor City suffered from an entire industry’s collapse and unprecedented, city-wide population decline. The 90,000 empty lots and 31,000 empty buildings spread across Detroit have become symbols of the city’s decay. Despite the consequences of nearly 10 years of economic stagnation, investment in infrastructure could mark an upturn for Detroit. In 2014, the City of Detroit announced a plan to invest $1.7 billion in neglected infrastructure projects. With this funding, the city hopes to revitalize past developers, while also encouraging projects from young entrepreneurs such as Andy Didorosi, who founded the Detroit Bus Company.
For example, the noted architectural firm Hamilton Anderson Associates recently completed renovations on the Strathmore apartment complex, housed in what was once a luxury hotel in Midtown Detroit. The firm was able to save the building from demolition, convert it into both luxury and affordable housing, and restore the structure to its former beauty. Reinvestment in the Strathmore apartments, now a signature of Midtown Detroit, is proof that aesthetically pleasing and innovative design can reshape a rising community.
An abandoned house in Delray, Detroit. This home is one of many across the city left vacant by a rapid decrease in population.
Architects and developers, both burgeoning and established, have the ability to reinvigorate Detroit and its hardest hit neighborhoods by preserving existing infrastructure while incorporating newer developments. Infrastructure is essential to creating a sense of community and developing the culture of an area. It permeates the cultural landscape of a neighborhood and must function as both as a piece of aesthetic beauty, and as a tool to invigorate an area’s economy. “It is sobering thinking that this will be around for a century or more and makes you think about where you put it and how you make it,” Brian Hayes, author of Infrastructure: The Book of Everything for the Industrial Landscape, told the HPR. “You constantly need to focus on solving the next thing, not what you don’t like now.” Both the Detroit Bus Line and the Strathmore apartment complex demonstrate the ability of locally-based infrastructure entrepreneurs to transform a city through the aesthetics of their projects. By revitalizing the city through infrastructure, Detroit can begin to drive itself out of its recent downturn and once again become the all-American city.
Global Infrastructure – Japanese Design in the 21st Century
A bullet train on a platform in Kyoto, Japan.
Bullet trains have become synonymous with Japanese infrastructure. The Shinkansen–the network of bullet trains that has become a symbol of national development pride–runs alongside the greenery of rural Japan. The stark gray trains create a blunt contrast with their natural surroundings. This may soon change. A new bullet train design by architect Kazuyo Sejima would allow bullet trains to blend into their surroundings, rendering them nearly invisible. Constructed with a semi-reflective outer shell, the train would reflect the landscapes it runs through, integrating the necessity of mass transit with the tranquility of nature. The train, set to open in 2018, blends both natural and urban elements to create a more pleasurable mass transit experience. “The appearance of something, the cleanliness of it, all play a role into a perception of value,” Monica Tibbits-Nutt, director of the MBTA Fiscal Management Control Board, told the HPR. “I think [aesthetics] is huge for perception and the way people treat trains and stations.”
Trains are not the only aspect of Japanese infrastructure to move toward integrated design. The Sendai Mediatheque, a library and media center designed by Pritzker prize winning architect Toyo Ito, is a quintessential example of aesthetic innovation. Its design takes elements of the natural world and blends them into a building whose sole purpose is to house technology. The seven-story building is intended to be a fluid space where media technology, including a movie theater and wide-ranging film and audio recording collection, form a part of the urban environment. The columns that line the cube-shaped building appear tree-like, mirroring the rows of tree-lined streets that surround the building. Similarly, the tubular interior shafts of the building symbolize the seaweed that grows around Japan. The openness and translucence of the glass allows the Sendai Mediatheque to change as the seasons do, effectively blurring boundaries between the natural and man-made world.
An exterior view of the Sendai Mediatheque.
As the world turns to Japan for the future of infrastructure design, Japanese aesthetics have arguably played an influential role in the architectural community for nearly a century. The controversial modernist architecture of the mid-20th century was created by architects who had already looked toward Japan. In Japanese aesthetics, American architect Frank Lloyd Wright found an “organic” approach to design, one that integrates a simple composition into the beauty of natural surroundings. Although 21st-century architects continue to look to Japan for the future of design, Japanese aesthetics have already played a fundamental role in building the concrete world. By fusing this concrete with nature, investing in local entrepreneurs and designers, and erecting skyscrapers around ethnic and cultural enclaves, the modern city can unite aesthetic form with architectural functionality, making our concrete jungle both a place to live and to enjoy living.
Featured Image Source: Flickr/souparna
In-Text Image Sources (in order): Flickr/kenlund; Wikimedia Commons/Mackerm; Wikimedia Commons/Notorious4life; Wikimedia Commons/Notorious4life; Flickr/Ray_LAC; Flickr/scarletgreen