The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles

Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis. Infrastructure has ceased to support architecture's plans for the city and instead subordinates 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 the people, objects, and capital. A provocative collection of research through photography, essays and maps, this is book looks at infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in the city, remaining optimistic about the role of architecture to affect change.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).