STRANGE AGENCIES

Infrastructure and Projective Drawing

Presentation for confirmation of PhD candidature, Friday 24 April, 2015.

Carl Douglas

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1. RESEARCH SUMMARY

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How might alternative approaches to projective drawing open new design

spaces for addressing conjunctions between infrastructure and public space?

The historic distinction between private and public space no longer holds
today in our urbanised world; a logic of infrastructure governs contemporary
cities. Infrastructure has become a prevailing model for organising space,
time, human and nonhuman relations. In this situation, alternative
approaches to the practice of projective drawing could produce new ways of
understanding infrastructural space for design and thereby contribute to a
rejuvenation of the public realm. Representations in design are not simply
descriptive or denotative but generate agencies and opportunities for action,
they play a performative role in designing.

In this thesis, therefore, a series of speculative design proposals for Auckland’s

Māngere Inlet will serve not only as case studies but be instrumental in
developing alternative approaches to infrastructures. The value of this
research is its contribution to new models of design practice, better suited to
contemporary urban conditions, through the testing and developing of new
representational techniques for architects and designers, based on the
architectural tradition of projective drawing.

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Fig. 1
Boolean intersection drawing.
Pencil on butter paper (c.2004).
2. RATIONALE AND SIGNIFICANCE

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The projective drawing I use in my design practice as a primary medium is

in parts still based on the innovations of projective drawing that mark the
commencement of Architecture in the modern disciplinary sense. Starting
with the formalisation of perspective techniques in the early 15th century, a
systematic descriptive geometry emerged by the mid-17th century
introducing a codified space of translation and mediation into the production
of the built environment. Various drawing techniques — plan, section,
elevation, oblique, perspective, isometric —became formalised within a
general apparatus of projective geometry. This marked a shift away from the
architect’s role, as large-scale-sculptor or expert builder, towards a newly
abstracted practice.

Thus, architecture is equipped with a set of representational tools capable of

working on large and complex projects. Techniques of projective drawing
mark out the propensities of a design that in turn condition what can be
designed in it. In McLuhan’s terms, the relationship between medium and
content is not arbitrary; rather, the medium embeds meaningful, value-laden,
active propensities (1987: 7-21) 1 . A design space is also a space for
negotiation: even before negotiations themselves take place, their terms have
already formed, constrained and opened up the kinds of controversy and
resolution that are possible here.2

Projective drawing3 — as a set of techniques defining a design space — is

1
McLuhan advocates the value of ignoring content entirely in order to expose these
propensities.
2
Bruno Latour draws attention to controversies or "matters of concern" as "the res that
creates a public around it" (2005: 6). A space of negotiation is only opened once controversial
matters are able to appear (Latour, 1993; 2004). This is described as a metaphoric
cartography (2005: 23-24).
3
In mathematical terms, projective geometry relates to transformations instigated by
projection to a point at infinity, while descriptive geometry is concerned with the
description of three dimensional figures in two dimensions. I have reversed this, seeing
descriptive geometry as the more general condition, of which perspectival projection to a
point is a subset (O'Leary, 2010; Lee and Reekie, 1945; Whitehead, 1906; 1914)

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Fig. 2
Afternoon House I
Pencil on butter paper (2006)
oriented towards a particular spatiality. It excels at describing distributions of
matter in relatively constrained areas where mass and volume can be
perceived, that is, a spatiality of open and closed domains, ratios of solid and
void ( Fig. 1). Without artefacts that can be approximated as geometric
solids, the threshold between maps and plans, or cartographic and
orthographic projections, becomes blurred 4 . The former attempt, with
difficulty, to unfold a non-flat surface onto a sheet (Synder, 1993; 2007;
Corner 1999). Orthographic projections, by contrast, resolve the problem of
reducing a three-dimensional world onto a flat sheet through the device of
the cutting plane and picture plane, usually conflated.

When things can no longer be perceived as solid objects, the conventions of

projective drawing dominant in architecture falter.

This thesis research will advance through a projective drawing practice that
builds on previous experiments. In the Afternoon House series (2002-09, Fig.
2; Douglas, 2009a), for example, I exploited the relationship between the
cutting plane (as an invisible cutting of mass with a plane) and Boolean
subtraction (as a cutting of mass with volume). Solid matter comes into
existence in a field of invisible and active geometries. The Afternoon House
series’ traditional design space, however, while ideally suited for describing
and manipulating solid geometries, struggles when it is to meaningfully
describe things that don’t easily appear in that form. Even to credit the
existence of things that aren’t conceived as solid geometries becomes
difficult. This has precedent: for Descartes, the essential being of a ’thing’ was
equivalent to its being a solid geometry (1999). And yet, it has become
increasingly urgent for architects to be able to account for things other than
those that appear easily in projective geometry5.

Infrastructure, for example, confronts descriptive geometry's limits.

Infrastructures are systems of mobility, communication, service, and
environmental control that underpin human environments (Bélanger, 2008;
Varnelis, 2009; see below). Their dominance in contemporary cities alone

4
Hubert Damisch points to specific problem of clouds as resistent to the rules of perspective
construction oriented towards solid objects (2002).
5
This is suggested by architecture's "performative turn towards geographical methods and
imagery" (Gissen, 2008: 59). Such a turn was anticipated by Gregotti (2009).

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warrants careful design attention. Infrastructures are vastly distributed,
performative rather than formal, temporally fast rather than relatively fixed.
Infrastructures are large, diffused in their effects, comprised of a mixture of
material and immaterial elements, configured, assembled, maintained and
developed by many different agencies.

Infrastructures aren’t simply a step up in scale from a large building, but

present a new spatial condition for architects to negotiate. 6 Although the
infrastructural order of cities dates back at least to the mid-nineteenth
century (see section 2 below), architecture’s tools for apprehending it are still
weak. The controversies, opportunities, linkages, disconnections,
distributions, matter, energies, of the infrastructural world only appear
obliquely in its modes of drawing.

Consequently, the need to confront infrastructure from a design perspective

is pressing. Infrastructures aren’t just prevalent, but also fundamental.
Infrastructures surround us, but they also “reside in a naturalized
background, as ordinary and unremarkable to us as trees, daylight and dirt”
and act “as environment, as social setting, and as the invisible, unremarked
basis of modernity itself” (Edwards, 2003: 185-6). This naturalisation and
backgrounding means that they play key roles in “sustaining sociotechnical
geometries of power” (Graham, 2000: 115). Infrastructures aren’t just
elements of a city, but the contemporary spatial order of cities. They are a
fundamental ordering principle of the urban, and we must be deeply
concerned about the nature of public space, and how our space, time,
human and nonhuman relationships are being constructed infrastructurally.
Infrastructural space creates particular problems for the idea of public space.
In spite of recent calls for infrastructures to be understood as “commons”,
they are typically planned, built, and managed as proprietary and privileged
systems (Frischmann, 2012). As Graham and Marvin indicate, infrastructural
order is responsible for a “splintering” of urban spaces once conceived as
“public” into secure enclaves and tiered networks (Graham and Marvin,
2000).

6
The difference is like the one Morton proposes between ‘objects’ and ‘hyperobjects’ (2011;
2013). The latter, for Morton are, like Susan Stewart's gigantic objects, only ever
experienced partially (Stewart, 1993).

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A design discipline that wishes to operate on the underpinnings of the city,
not only on its superstructure, needs a new design space: a new way of
seeing and describing infrastructurally. This thesis will produce
representational strategies as new mediations for new negotiations. The
complex range of things that exist in the city will be brought together in a
space of mediation which this research will produce through experiments,
transformations, and new conventions of projective drawing. Far from
accepting that projective drawing simply belongs to an obsolete past, this
thesis proposes that it remains fecund and, in re-envisioning projective
drawing, it also reaches for future design practices.

The significance and value of this research is in:

1. Developing innovative techniques to meet the needs of architects

and other designers engaging with urbanised contexts; particularly in
their attempts to ameliorate or exploit infrastructural space.

2. Re-envisioning and providing an original account of infrastructural

space from the perspective of the representational space on which it
rests.

3. Enabling the imagination of new forms for architecture and urban

design disciplines.

4. Presenting novel proposals for a site dominated by infrastructures.

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3. LITERATURE REVIEW

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Drawing, mediation and ontogenesis

Architectural drawings don't "re-produce architecture. They produce it in the

first place" (Benjamin, 1988: 89; Vidler, 2000: 7). Robin Evans pointed out
that architectural drawing is not simply "a truck for pushing ideas from place
to place" (1997: 186). The idea of drawing as a neutral bearer of ideal
content, "a uniform space through which meaning may glide without
modulation" may be delusional, but it is also an "enabling fiction" (154). The
ambiguity of both upholding and disbelieving translation motivates
architectural practice, enabling representation to be generative, not merely
communicative. As an "allographic" practice, questions of agency and
authorship are complicated for architecture (Goodman, 1968: 113). New
technologies and modes of practice, while offering new complications and
opportunities, have not lessened the significance of this mediation7. Marco
Frascari referred to drawing as a "facture": a genetic process of fabricating
fact:

"the ontogenesis of architectural lines assimilate within itself the

primary processes of designation that take place on construction sites.
Lines weave enigmas that are slowly translated on paper and their
solution determines architects' ability to consider and savor the facture
of the building." (Frascari, 2011: 69; see also 2007, 2009).

Architecture's "ontogenesis" is fundamentally mediated, at least since the

arrival of projective drawing in the sixteenth century which constituted
architecture as a modern discipline (see below).

Awareness of this transformational mediation drove two major approaches in

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Allen: "the computer simultaneously collapses and increases the distance between the
architect's two-dimensional representations and the building's three-dimensional reality"
(2000: 151). Wood argues that a shift from manual to digital technologies doesn't constitute
a paradigm shift, since the underlying ideological framework hasn't changed (Wood, 2002:
iii). It is important not to underestimate the unique aspects of Building Information
Modelling approaches, however.

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the late twentieth century: the critical and the generative. Both followed
modernism's general disdain for mediation and desire for immediacy (Latour,
1993). Critical approaches derived from structuralist and post-structuralist
critiques of translation and its role in architectural modernity (Wigley, 1993;
1999; Derrida and Hanel, 1990, Ingraham, 1988). Generative approaches
emphasised the technical aspects of representation, particularly with reference
to new software and techniques. Within this line of development, digital
tools are exploited for their generative potential, their capacity to produce
designs that introduce automated or other agencies into design production
(Schumacher, 2011; Weinstock, 2006; Lynn, 1999; Alonso and Mayne,
2009; Anderson, 2009; Douglas, 2007a). Both critical and generative
approaches share a reference point in the formalist work of Peter Eisenman
(Bois, 1994; Eisenman, 2003).

My research makes a third approach, aligning with Foucault's description of

architecture as technē, "a practical rationality governed by a conscious goal"
(1984: 255; Latour, 2008; Allen, 2009: xvi-xviii, Meagher, 1988; Veseley:
241-2; Borden: 11-19). Robin Evans and Stan Allen are key precedents in
this line (Evans, 1995; 1997.; Allen, 1985; 2000; 2009) Allen writes:

To understand representation as technique (in Foucault's broader sense

of technē) is therefore to pay attention to the paradoxical character of a
discipline that operates to organize and transform material reality, but
must do so at a distance, and through highly abstract means. (2009:
xvii)

This approach also draws on Bruno Latour's description of mediated action:

"By definition, action is dislocated. Action is borrowed, distributed,
suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, translated." (2005: 46; 2007;
1996). To examine a facture's weaving, then, is to trace the channels through
which architectural agency comes about.

Each mode of architectural drawing (or architectural representation more

generally) opens a particular space for design action; a space that comes pre-
formatted with possibilities, constraints, defaults, tendencies.

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Fig. 3
Sectional detail of entablature.
Philibert Delormé (1567: 151)
Projective drawing as a design space

The formulation of the modern discipline of architecture turned on new

representational techniques arising in the Renaissance 8 . First perspective,
then orthographic geometry as a means for stereotomy, lead to a systematised
descriptive geometry serving as the central implement of architectural
production (Evans, 1995). Key to this shift is a movement of abstraction:
where perspectival space was primarily a drawn simulation of bodily vision,
descriptive geometry creates a logically consistent abstract space that doesn't
correspond to bodily vision. Solid objects were cast into: “a place for abstract
thought about architecture, governed by the codes and conventions of
discourse… delineated apart from the building site" (Allen, 2000: xiv).

Perspective comes into focus as a technique with Brunelleschi and Alberti

(Vesely, 2004: 144-9; Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier, 1997: 24-6; Alberti,
1988). According to Panofsky's seminal analysis it is a "symbolic form"
(1991); more than simply technique, a conceptual domain, a rational,
universal space deriving from a seeing subject. Vesely sees this development
allied to a model of "divided representation" mirroring the simultaneous
Cartesian division of subject and object (2004: 176-226). Pérez-Gómez
highlights the importance of the viewer’s position at a distance (1982: 88-
127; Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier, 1997); and Damisch makes the even more
radical claim that modern subjectivity depends on the existence of
perspective technique (1994).

Philibert Delormé's Premiere Tome de l'Architecture (1567) is substantially

devoted to the use of descriptive geometry for the purposes of stereotomy
(Etlin, 2012). The immaterial projective lines of perspective, commonly
understood as rays of light, are brought into an active relationship with solid
matter. In an oblique drawing of a classical entablature (Fig. 3), Delormé cuts
the notional solids twice. In the background, the cut is a pictorial break, as if
the stone had been fractured and broken off. In the foreground, however,
the cut is an abstract slice. Into this we can read a dual allegiance of the
drawing to the world of matter, and abstract geometric space.

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Pérez-Gómez describes two transformations—a 17th century geometrisation, and an 18th
century scientisation, both allied with new representational modes—as constitutive of
modern architecture (1983: 10-11).

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Fig. 4
Perspectival distortion for column sections.
Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz (1678: Plate 24).
By the time Palladio, in his influential Four Books (1997), adopted Serlio’s
technique of pairing orthographic plan and section drawings — that is,
intersecting horizontal and vertical picture planes — the architect had shifted
away from being large-scale sculptors or expert builders into a newly
abstracted practice (Serlio, 1982). Sacrificing something of their claims to
immediacy and craft, architects opened up a new conceptual space for
design, a new way of conceiving the space in which architecture could be
formed.

Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier compare the use of projection by Caramuel de

Lobkowitz and Desargues, seeing in the latter a totalising system, and in the
former “a ‘strange’ symbolic order”(1997: 125-138; Lobkowitz, 1678).
Rather than providing a unifying space, Caramuel’s projections are a means
to distort and deform (Fig. 4). Notably, Caramuel was criticised by Guarini
(Pérez-Gómez and Pelletier, 1997: 161-176; Meek, 1988; Fig. 5). Although
Guarini also saw projective geometry as opening a symbolic order, he
couldn’t accept distortion and subjectivity. Projective drawing provided a
unified space of rhetorical significance (Pérez-Gómez, 1983: 88-96);
infinities and limit states confronted in drawing took on symbolic importance
(Veseley, 2004: 196-212). Later work on projective drawing, particularly by
Desargues (1987) and Monge (1798; Sakarovitch, 2009) broached its
mathematical description and its relation to other generalised geometric
spaces (see also Whitehead’s axiomatic accounts: 1906, 1914).

For Preston Scott Cohen, projective drawing remains a means to discover,

interpret and produce “predicaments” (2001: 12). He analyses conflicting
formal imperatives manifested in apparent inconsistencies or oddities in
Renaissance and Baroque buildings, particularly as they emerge in the
interplay of projection planes. He highlights Brook Taylor’s alternative
reconciliation of perspectival and orthographic projection from 1715
(Taylor, 1835), exploiting it as a method for collapsing and “inflating” form
according to the distortion of symmetries (Cohen, 54-69; Fig. 6).

This representational space preconditions the field in which designing will

take place: encouraging and discouraging, making certain configurations
appear as problems and preventing others from surfacing at all. That is, it is a

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Fig. 5
Plan and reflected ceiling plan for Sacra Sindone, Turin.
Guarino Guarini (Meek, 1988).
Fig. 6
Rectilinear Spiriculate.
Preston Scott Cohen (2001: 99).
design space: the field of the project’s possibility. In the terms of systems
analysis, a design space could be imagined as a state space: the cumulative
field of potential established by all the variables in a system.9

City as no thing

While projective geometry has provided the dominant design space for
architectural practice since its instigation as a modern discipline, it comes
aground when it is used as a means to address contemporary urban
conditions. As long as cities were relatively compact and could be treated as
limited spatial zones within the larger matrix of the countryside, the tools of
architectural representation could be stretched to apply. Camillo Sitte's
analysis of urban rooms (2013), building on the same kind of spatiality
represented by Giambattista Nolli's map ( Fig. 7), exemplifies the treatment
of city as an architectural pattern of solid and void10. Today, cities can no
longer be regarded as limited zones, and the construction of public spaces as
urban rooms is swamped and rendered almost irrelevant by the sheer scale,
speed, and diversity of agencies at work.

Brenner, upholding Lefebvre’s pronouncement that “Society has been

completely urbanized” (Lefebvre, 2003; Brenner, 2013; 2014) argues that the
urban can’t be seen as a delimited condition, in which some places are cities,
and therefore urban, while others are not cities, and are therefore exempt
from the urban 11 . Urbanisation is a global condition, in which even the
remotest places on the planet are intricately tied into supply chains,
population movements, resource production, and waste disposal. City has
already become cotextant with world. Even the most remote sites: arctic
wastes or equatorial rainforests, are already organised by the logic of cities,

9
For systems analysis in general, see Bateson (2000). Alexander makes a specific application
of this model as a design methodology (1964). De Landa describes the relationship of various
geometries, including projective geometry, in system analysis terms (2002: 24-26), and
provides a primer on state spaces (13-4).
10
Aureli argues, however, that Nolli's map marks "the difference between architectural space
and urban space" ( 2011: 109).
11
The oft-cited United Nations analysis claiming that 50% of the human population new
live in cities is statistically doubtful, as Neil Brenner has explained, because it's virtually
impossible to articulate meaningfully what counts as living in the city (Burdett and Sudjic,
2007; 2011; Brenner, 2013, 2014 ).

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Fig. 7
La nuova topografia di Roma Comasco
Giambattista Nolli (1784).
used for energy generation, resource extraction, recreation, pollution sinks (
Fig. 8).

The foolishness of ideas of 'the global' is lampooned by Bruno Latour, who

notes that when the term is spoken aloud it is often accompanied by a hand
gesture about the size of a pumpkin (2009: 141). There is no single space in
which everything can be brought together: no globe, no environment that
can hold everything (Sloterdijk, 2011, Latour, 2008). The description of city
can't be addressed as any less complex or localised than the problem of
describing world in general (with 'world' here in its philosophical sense,
indicating the irreducible totality of what is).

If any value is to be retained or recuperated for concepts of thingliness or

objecthood it may come through recent speculative philosophy centring on
objects: Timothy Morton's "hyperobjects" or Graham Harman's notion of
the "withdrawn" object, Bryant's "onto-cartographies", or Garcia's "de-
determined things" (Morton, 2011; 2013; Harman 2006; 2013; also Bryant,
2014; Garcia, 2014).

Administratively unified cities

Foucault identifies a new politicisation of architecture in the eighteenth

century, when discussions of politics and governance would appear to begin
to obsess over architecture and urban form. States begin to be conceived on
the model of cities: "The city was no longer perceived as a place of privilege,
as an exception in a territory of fields, forests, and roads... cities, with the
problems that they raised, and the particular forms that they took, served as
models for the governmental rationality that was to apply to the whole of the
territory." (Foucault, 1984: 241). A project emerges "to create a system of
regulation of the general conduct of individuals whereby everything would
be controlled to the point of self-sustenance, without the need for
intervention" (241-2). Cartography, progressively geometrised from the
Renaissance (Fig. 9, 10) became instrumental in this project.

When Baron von Haussmann implemented his Second Empire urban plan
for Paris (1853-1867), he inaugurated a new infrastructural model for cities.

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Fig. 8
Arctic Resource Urbanization.
Op.N (Fard and Jafari, 2013).
His broad boulevards, "the epitome and the condenser of Second Empire
daily life: the modern artifact par excellence", served social, political,
economic and military ends (Fig. 11; Vidler 1978: 94-5; Benjamin 1999:
133, 12; Douglas 2007b); but they need to be understood more broadly as
articulating a new ideal of the city's administrative rationalisation: "a
technocratically minded comprehensive approach to town planning in which
a rationalised circulatory network would once and for all sweep away... the
dross of the community's promiscuous life through time" (Kostof and
Castillo 1995: 11). Rabinow called this idea "technocosmopolitanism... the
operationalization of history, society, and culture" (1996: 59).

Central to this operationalisation were the metaphors of organism and

machine (Graham & Marvin 2001: 62). Although the organic and machinic
might superficially appear to be opposing models, they were in fact united by
an “implicit theory of assemblage”, an attempt to see the city as a thing, an
entity with some unifying principle (Douglas 2009b: 97, De Landa 2006).
According to the integrated model, any element that isn’t serving the whole
– anything disruptive, broken, or divergent – is not part of the city at all.12

Graham and Marvin point to Haussmann’s works as a transitional point in

the conception of the street as a public space. Previously streets had been
primarily civic spaces where public relations could take place in person: “the
primary ingredient of urban existence … a structure on which to weave the
complex interactions of the architectural fabric and human organization …
meeting spaces between more or less privileged citizens” (Çelik et al. 1994:
1). Under the unified city regime, however, streets became conduits for
bundled technical systems; a rationalised circulatory system. This regime
dominated (and arguably originated) the discipline of modern city-planning,
and the persistence of its effects in contemporary cities – even antipodean
ones of the 21st century – can be observed.13

12
Haussmann's complaints about renters "who compromise the signification of the vote by
the weight of their unintelligent votes" (Jordan, 1995: 343) are symptomatic.
13
The Auckland Liveable Arterials Plan (2008), for instance, explains “Pedestrianisation adds
to the vibrancy and quality of the public realm, through enabling face to face contact and
interaction.” This anodyne phrase receives no unpacking, and the document immediately
segues into measures “to maximise pedestrian movement” (2). The suburban street is
drained of all operation other than smooth circulation and a vague aesthetic aspiration for

13
Fig. 9
Plan of Imola.
Leonardo da Vinci (1502).
Fig. 10
Diagrams of the effect on fortifications
produced by ranged weapons.
E.-E.Viollet-le-Duc (1874).
Fig. 11
Schematic plan of Paris in 1871 after Haussmann’s
interventions; and locations of barricades 1795-1871.
(Redrawn from Phillippe, 1989).
In the Haussmannian model of public space, the public good is the wellbeing
of the administratively-imagined city, and the city’s inhabitants are either an
audience for urban spectacle or simply one of the flows to be kept in smooth
circulation. The city is instrumentalised and integrated into a systematic
construction.

Publics

Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “[t]he community that becomes a single thing (body,
mind, fatherland, Leader…)… necessarily loses the in of being-in-common."
(Nancy, 1991: xxxix). The singularisation of a community is often portrayed
as the restoration of an "original community", conceived as an unmediated
co-presence. Nancy points out that there is no space in this configuration,
nothing but preassigned locations. The public, and public space, is necessarily
something open-ended and in formation, without the kind of closure aspired
to in the administratively rationalised city. There is no single ‘public’ or
‘community’, but an ongoing process of political formations, allegiances and
"dissensus" (Ranciere, 2001).

For Hannah Arendt, the public was a space of contingency and risk: "the
consequences of action are ‘boundless’, uncontrollable, irreversible and
unpredictable, where ‘not life but the world is at stake’” (Arendt,1998: 190).
She saw the public as formed in a binary opposition to the private,
specifically “the pre-political realm of the household", understood as a place
of deprivation of public connection (Arendt, 1998: 32; Baird, 2011: 29-31).
Nolli's map of Rome rendering domestic space as solid and closed matter
anticipates something of Arendt's idea.14

For Arendt, the public was a space of contingency and risk: "the

“vibrancy”. These factors are treated as intangibles, a gloss coat over what is fundamentally
an infrastructural system.
14
The hope of the public realm is the possibility of action, the “revelatory quality of speech
and action [that] comes to the fore when people are with others and neither for nor against
them” (Arendt, 1998: 180). Action, for Arendt isn’t simply a means to an end, but an end in
itself: that is, action needs to be generated not simply in the service of some immediate or
distant goal, but in and for itself. This is directly counter to the utilitarian and administrative
‘police’ logic of the administratively rationalised city.

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consequences of action are ‘boundless’, uncontrollable, irreversible and
unpredictable, where ‘not life but the world is at stake’” (Arendt,1998: 190).
She saw the public as formed in a binary opposition to the private,
specifically “the pre-political realm of the household", understood as a place
of deprivation of public connection (Arendt, 1998: 32; Baird, 2011: 29-31).
Nolli's map of Rome rendering domestic space as solid and closed matter
anticipates something of Arendt's idea.15

A key constituent of publicness Warner posits, is the figure of the stranger,

one who “cannot be known in advance… an environment of strangerhood
is the necessary premise of some of our most prized ways of being.” (74-5).
Exposure to the outside, to outsiders, to the foreign or the alien, is essential
to publicness (Kristeva, 1991). Further, the foreigner and the outsider is not
simply external, but enter in. Recently, Timothy Morton has proposed the
concept of the "strange stranger" — not simply the human subject as
irreducibly Other, but inhuman others (Morton, 2010: 15). For Morton, our
space must be recognised as radically public, not simply as a Habermasian
gathering of human individuals, but an ecologically unlimited network of
relations.

The topological figure of the network has recently grown in significance in

conceptions of publicness. For Castells (1996), this is for techno-cultural
reasons and for De Landa (2011) for ontological reasons. For Latour,
pragmatic, ontological and political motivations align. He calls for a
“compositionism” in which “things have to be put together while retaining
their heterogeneity” (2010: 3). Insisting that things’ not sticking together
simply through a kind of ontological gravity means that every structure or
grouping must be understood as contentiously constructed and laboriously
maintained. He imagines an ‘object-oriented’ democracy, in which the list of
entities implicated can never be foreclosed by fiat, but must remain
permanently and radically under construction (Latour and Weibel, 2005).

15
The hope of the public realm is the possibility of action, the “revelatory quality of speech
and action [that] comes to the fore when people are with others and neither for nor against
them” (Arendt, 1998: 180). Action, for Arendt isn’t simply a means to an end, but an end in
itself: that is, action needs to be generated not simply in the service of some immediate or
distant goal, but in and for itself. This is directly counter to the utilitarian and administrative
‘police’ logic of the administratively rationalised city.

15
Another model of open publicness is provided by Rancière, who contrasts
two regimes: “politics” and “the police”. The police is a regime in which
everything is assigned a place, without remainder: “an accounting that only
divides and counts according to principles of unity (rich, poor, bus-drivers,
minors, movie-goers, baby-boomers, terrorists, etc.” (2001) A politics
worthy of its name adds to this accounting a “part of no-part” — that is, it
insists on an outside to the neatly subdivided world of the police (2001)16. As
an example of this distinction, Rancière points to the production of the
street as a space of circulation rather than public identity:

Move along! There is nothing to see here!” The police says that there is
nothing to see on a road, that there is nothing to do but move along. It
asserts that the space of circulating is nothing other than the space of
circulation. Politics, in contrast, consists in transforming the space of
‘moving-along’ into a space for the appearance of a subject: i.e. the
people, the workers, the citizens: it consists in refiguring the space, of
what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein. (2001)

The administrative rationalisation of the city aims at precisely this kind of

allocation: the simultaneous production and suppression of space where there
is nothing to see, and all that remains is to keep moving. “In this fittingness
of functions, places, and ways of being, there is no place for a void” (2001).

The city cannot be imagined as a lucid construction. Its space is not a space
of administrative simplicity, but of voiding, strangeness, dissensus,
contingency and composition.

Infrastructure as urban order

The administratively rationalised city is set out infrastructurally. As Foucault

pointed out:

It was not architects, but engineers and builders of bridges, roads,

viaducts, railways, as well as the polytechnicians... those are the people

16
Contends Rancière, “political struggle is not a conflict between well-defined interest
groups; it is an opposition of logics that count the parties and parts of the community in
different ways.” (Rancière 2001).

16
 who thought out space. [Architects] are not the technicians or
engineers of the three great variables‚ territory, communication, and
speed. These escape the domain of architects. (1984: 244).

Infrastructures are not neutral service systems. Infrastructure "is not the
declared content but rather the content manager dictating the rules of the
game... it orchestrates activities that can remain unstated but are nevertheless
consequential" (Easterling, 2014: 14-15). They are key elements of a
distribution of the sensible. Vast tracts of land are devoted to these
distributed networks, and their hubs: roads, energy transmission lines,
railways, goods distribution sites, telecommunications exchanges, water
reticulation, air-conditioning, cell towers. Sewage treatment plants, rail
switching yards, data centres, power stations, cable landing stations are
typically fenced-off operations comprising entire precincts. A concern for the
public space of the city must necessarily take account of this infrastructural
condition.

Infrastructure is inherently socio-technical, with a wider scope than simply a

working technology. Hughes offered the concept of the "large technological
system" (Hughes, 1987). Systems often do not have sharply defined edges,
but are still characterised by some degree of internal consistency:

An artifact—either physical or nonphysical—functioning as a

component in a system interacts with other artifacts, all of which
contribute directly or through other components to the common
system goal (1987: 51).

Infrastructural systems can include organisations, "components usually

labelled scientific... legislative artifacts... natural resources". They are “socially
constructed and society shaping”, and they “contain messy, complex,
problem-solving components” (51). They are large in that they are often
extensive, but also large in their complexity and number of components.
These extensive systems are operating as a means, that is as conveyors of
some intentionality, some “common system goal” (51).

17
Edwards collates a number of definitions of infrastructure (2003). 17 A key
notion is that of naturalisation, invisibility, submergence. Infrastructures, tend
to disappear, vanishing behind the ubiquitous presence of a service. This
allows them to act “as environment, as social setting, and as the invisible,
unremarked basis of modernity itself” (186). He also points to the various
non-hardware elements of infrastructures, including "organizations, socially
communicated background knowledge" (188). As backgrounds, "[t]he most
salient characteristic of technology in the modern (industrial and
postindustrial) world is the degree to which most technology is not salient for
most people, most of the time” (185).

‘Infra’ is a relative designation rather than an absolute one, and while many
infrastructures are literally subterranean, burial in ground is not their defining
characteristic. Rather, the submergence is beneath a surface of relevancy.
This surface of relevancy is not simply a surface of perception—
infrastructures might be in plain sight, a line of transmission towers marching
across a landscape, but remain unobserved, unnoticed, ‘infra’. Similarly, this
surface of relevancy is not just a surface of awareness—when I plug a kettle
into a power socket, or pull the plug from a sink, I am at best minimally
aware of the networks I am activating and relying on. Infrastructures, as with
many technologies in general, “reside in a naturalized background, as
ordinary and unremarkable to us as trees, daylight and dirt” (185). Harman,
in his reading of Heidegger, describes this backgrounding as "withdrawal"
(2006).

The importance of infrastructure to the twentieth century development of

capitalism is emphasised by Manuel Castells (1996). Since his proposition that
global infrastructures support a "space of flows" (407), flow has been a central
term in understandings of the contemporary urban context (Sassen, 2012;
Moreno, 2010; Delanda, 1997). Flow has recently been critiqued, however,
as naturalising movements of people, money, resources, goods, debts, waste
etc., when what is at stake is precisely how those things are made to move,

17
Notably the term originates in nineteenth-century France. It was included in Robert's
dictionary in 1875.

18
rendered as flows (Gille, 2010; Farías and Bender, 2010; Douglas 2014).18 For
example, Easterling points to the propagation of international standards
produced and distributed by private organisations, governing everything
from credit card thickness to shipping container size, to environmental
reporting standards, to ISO 9000's management procedures and definitions of
quality (2014). These standards provide the necessary modularity to ensure
minimal friction in global circulation. Questions of access come to dominate
infrastructures: tolls, memberships, competencies act as gatekeepers for who
can act or inhabit public space. Where infrastructures had once been seen as
part of the public good, their development under neoliberal capitalism
involves what Graham and Marvin interpret as a "splintering", with a
corresponding splintering of the public realm (Graham and Marvin, 2001).

Infrastructures were once associated with states, as the only actors with
sufficient resources to administer them. This has changed, as Varnelis shows,
so that infrastructures now form "networked ecologies" comprised of many
actors, including states, corporations, non-government organisations, and
individuals (2009). Ecology as a formal or organisational metaphor has been
common in recent years, since it suggests a more open-ended approach to
urban conditions, one more easily allied to sustainable concerns (Mostafavi
and Doherty, 2010).

Cartographies

Gissen claims there has been a “performative turn towards geographical

methods and imagery in contemporary architecture”, evidenced by the
proliferation of maps, cartographic fieldwork, and “datascapes” (2008: 59;
Bordeleau and Bresler, 2010). Cosgrove claims “urban space and
cartographic space are inseperable” (2004: 48), with “the modern metropolis
constantly threatening to outstrip the map’s capacity either to make it legible
or to regulate its material and social disorder” (55).

James Corner describes mapping as “a fantastic cultural project, creating and

18
Castells himself noted that 'flow' is an abstraction for "purposeful, repetitive,
programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions
held by social actors in the economic, political, and symbolic structures of society" (442).

19
building the world as much as measuring and describing it” (1999: 213;
Harley, 1988; Beelen, 2009). Mapping works “less to mirror reality than to
engender the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live... mapping
unfolds potential... may generate new practices of creativity, practices that are
expressed not in the invention of novel form but in the productive
reformulation of what is already given” (213). Maps derive their agency from
their “double-sided characteristic”. They are simultaneously analogous to the
ground, according to some rules of projection, and abstract, selecting,
omitting and codifying:

the surface of the map functions like an operating table, a staging

ground or a theatre of operations upon which the mapper collects,
combines, connects, marks, masks, relates and generally explores.
These surfaces are massive collection, sorting and transfer sites, great
fields upon which real material conditions are isolated, indexed and
placed within an assortment of relational structures (215).19

In perspectival projection, lines converge on a viewpoint simulating the

presence of a human eye and the way solid geometries appear from a given
position. In orthographic projection, lines travel parallel, without
convergence; and masses are intersected by viewing planes. Cartographic
projection, by contrast is mainly concerned with how to unfold a spherical
or lumpy surface into two dimensions. The rules, codes, or conventions
according to which the map is projected from the ground might vary widely
( Fig. 12 ). Since the Earth’s surface is near-spherical, there is no way simply
to trace its surface onto a flat plane without some form of projection. Two
maps might project according to different rules: “[t]he same planet, the same
places, and yet significantly dissimilar relationships are revealed or, more
precisely, constructed” (217). Projections might disregard the geometric
contiguity of the terrain, as in semi-topological maps like Beck’s map of the
London Underground ( Fig. 13 ), or disregard the terrain altogether, as in
the case of topological maps of internet connectivity. These rules of

19
Corner refers to Deleuze and Guattari, who differentiate between maps and tracings
(1987). Tracing is “delineating patterns but revealing nothing new”, while a map “is open
and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant
modification” (12). Maps yield abstract machines or diagrams, pure functions that are mobile
and unlocalisable.

20
Fig. 12
Various cartographic projection systems.
Snyder (1989).
Fig. 13
Map of the London Underground
Harry Beck (1933).
Fig. 14
Spatiotemporal perspective for Temple Island.
Michael Webb (1987: 43).
projection may take any number of forms ( Fig. 14 ), but they cannot be
absent altogether for a drawing to be a map; and there must be some degree
of consistency or regularity in their conventions.

Corner experiments with these conventions in his Taking Measures across the
American Landscape (Corner and MacLean, 2000; Cosgrove, 2012: 87-103).
Recurrent in the maps he produced are the problems of infrastructural space
( Fig. 15 ) — particularly its foldings and discontinuities, and the entangling
of localised and distributed aspects.

Future Projections

Beneath apparent technical and bureaucratic complexity, I argue,

infrastructures represent a vastly oversimplified approach to the city, based on
optimising for selected factors. The administrative rationalisation of the city
separates it out into schematic layers that can be dealt out to various
disciplinary players. Infrastructure is treated as a matter of a fundamental
urban substrate, parcelling, servicing and spatio-politically pre-formatting the
ground on which designers operate. Benefit-cost analyses represent projects
through tables of weighted numerical values. Cultural, social or
environmental factors are often treated as externalities, or lumped together.
The inadequacy of such groupings is proven by the ease with which these
groupings can be outweighed by any factor deemed central to the project.
Such a system of weighting as part of a benefit-cost ratio relies on a
nonsensical form of accounting. If values can’t be weighted against each
other in some kind of notional scales (Flyvberg, 2009), infrastructural design
is only possible through vast oversimplification.

The ideal of Building Information Modelling (BIM) is that there is a single

space into which all relevant conditions can be collected and organised: A
digital model of the project can be evaluated in terms of its thermal
properties, structural behaviour, carbon footprint, visual affects, formal
consistency, economic viability, material costs. This apparently broad range
of conditions masks, however the fact that only properties that are explicitly
included exist in this design space. The space for design already includes a
tightly-fashioned straitjacket declaring certain conditions relevant or not
relevant to the project. There are, however, infinite conditions that are

21
Fig. 15
Rail Networks.
James Corner (Corner and MacLean 2000).
potentially relevant. Since no project can account for every condition each
project incorporates a continuous series of decisions about what is relevant
and irrelevant, pertinent and impertinent, inside and outside the project.
Each project negotiates its closure. There is not a single generic project
space, no total or minimum or baseline space in which everything can be
seen or heard.

While it is true, as Pérez-Gómez argues, that projective drawing played a key

role in the mathematisation of space (1983), in the imagination of a single res
extensa and therefore in underpinning this administrative rationalisation of
cities, projective drawing might also permit new ways of understanding
infrastructural space, providing a means for it to engage with the
contingencies, voids, strangeness and dissensus of public realms.

Infrastructures thus present a new condition for architects to negotiate.

Monge summarised the intention of descriptive geometry as obtaining “an
exact representation on two-dimensional drawings of three-dimensional
objects that require rigorous definition” and deducing from this “all that
necessarily follows from their shape and respective positions” (Sakarovitch,
2009: 1). The representational apparatus through which architectural practice
is mediated emphasises the description of the interplay of solid and void, the
disposition of matter in a constrained area, and the sensory effects that pertain
in this spaces. The controversies, opportunities, linkages, disconnections,
distributions, matter, energies, of the infrastructural world only appear
obliquely in these drawings.

Piranesi’s engagement with the ground of antique Rome necessarily involved

him in close examinations of infrastructure. Sewers, aqueducts, emissaria,
paving, plumbing and rubbish dumps all feature in his engravings (Fig. 16;
Ficacci, 2000). They are exposed and examined scenographically,
tectonically, structurally, and aesthetically; but they remain focused on
hardware and dislocated artefacts.20 When he brings together multiple views,
he is not concerned to unify these views into a single space. The provisional
unity of the drawing’s fragments is provided compositionally, within the
visual frame of the drawing.

20
Tafuri sees this emphasis on fragments as a conscious critical project undermining the
emerging rationalisation of space (1987).

22
This rigorously Cartesian focus on the size, shape and position of objects
needs to be opened up in the interests of a design space able to discern
infrastructures. Rather than simply decreeing projective drawing obsolete,
my research attempts to exploit and adjust it. Projection itself acts to produce
connection, and to collapse multiple dimensions into two. My aim is a
rejuvenated form of projective drawing, and allied to this, a new design
space, in which infrastructures can appear, be confronted, exploited,
appreciated or critiqued. In this way, I hope architects can position
themselves to take a stronger role in thinking public space.

23
Fig. 16
Study of a drain, Rome.
Giambattista Piranesi (Ficacci, 2000).
4. DESIGN OF THE STUDY

——————————————————————————————

This research is strategic, practice-led and speculative. A cyclical model of design

practice is the primary methodological framework. The practice will be
drawing-led, resulting in four speculative proposals for a selected case study
site, the Māngere Inlet.
The work for each project cycle will consist predominantly of drawings that
articulate exploration of new projective drawing techniques. This drawn
material will be divided into two parts: a sequential record of development;
and four document sets articulating design proposals. Each of the four
document sets will include additional material: site documentation, analysis,
diagrams, mapping, physical models, material tests; and significant exegetical
material. During each cycle, work in progress will be presented for critique.

Ultimately the research will be presented in a bound thesis, containing the

project work, exegetical material, reflections on practice, and framing
theoretical and methodological discussions. I intend to seek publication for
each project cycle as it is completed. The completed thesis will be
reformatted as a proposal for Pamphlet Architecture.

Strategy

The aim of this research is to generate techniques or strategies rather than

specific design solutions. These strategies are intended to be applicable to
sites where an engagement with infrastructure is either necessary or desirable.
Techniques and strategy being inherently open-ended, it is hoped that these
techniques will be adapted and applied to different situations. In this
research, design is treated as a discrete mode of intelligence, an inherently
strategic way of knowing (Cross, 2006; Boyer et al., 2011; Hill 2012).

Frayling describes three modes of design research: research through, for, and
into design (1993). Recently, research through design (that is research that
proceeds by means of designing, rather than research reflecting on design or
preparatory to design) has taken on two divergent forms. Some argue that
creative production is a form of research in and of itself, on the grounds that

24
something new is produced. It is unclear in this sense how research is to be
distinguished from advanced practice (Frayling, 1993; Till, 2008; Jenner,
2014). This approach has the benefit however of insisting that the design
research yields a different form of knowledge to that in, for example, the
sciences or humanities; that “architecture has its own particular knowledge
base and procedures” (Till, 2008: 3).21

Scrivener distinguishes two types of research in art and design: problem-

solving, and “creative-production” (2002). Characteristic of problem-solving
research is the production of some new or improved artefect that solves a
recognised problem, and embodies knowledge applicable or transferable to
other situations. In research like this, “knowledge reified in the artefact is of
greater value than the artefact [and] can be described separate from it (and is
thus sharable and reusable)” and “the beyond-the-single-case applicable and
transferable knowledge embodied in the artefact is of greater value than the
artefact, which is merely a demonstration of its existence” (26). Creative-
production research, by contrast, is “undertaken in order to generate novel
apprehensions... new interpretations that could fit the world” (33). Because
the artefact is the active generator of these new apprehensions, it can’t be
eliminated or set aside as provisional.

Insofar as my research emphasises technique, it is problem-solving research;

but this undervalues the role of the creative production in making surface the
problematic conditions investigated. Further, the value of the techniques
needs to be seen in the context of creative production; they are only of value
if they are of value in creative production. As Scrivener himself observes, the
distinction between problem-solving and creative-production research is not
absolute; and in my research it takes on a hybrid form. Design doesn’t simply
respond to problems formed elsewhere, but incorporates the discovery,
disclosure and invention of problems (Cross, 2009; Jenner, 2014). The
strategies developed in this research are not simply solutions to a problem
established in advance. Although a broad problem field is established (the
relationship between infrastructure, cities, and design approaches), problems
are discovered through the research. The value of the research in this sense is

21
Till suggests architectural research can be divided into three “stages”: architectural
processes, architectural products, and architectural performance (2007: 4). My research sits
within the first of these.

25
in offering a space where a broad range of new problems can be discerned.

Speculative Practice

This research is practice-led: it exists for the sophistication of practice; in this

case a design practice centred on projective drawing.

As practice-led research, it exploits tacit forms of knowledge. Tacit

knowledge is something to be interrogated and critiqued for its assumptions,
conventions, and genealogy; but also to be valued. Tacit knowledge is not
simply knowledge that has not yet been made explicit, it is a different
structure of knowing incorporating both a “proximal” and “distal term”:
“[i]n an act of tacit knowing we attend from something for attending to
something else.” (Polanyi, 1966: 10). This aligns neatly with the role ascribed
to drawing in architectural practice by Evans and Allen. As the know-how of
practice, a significant dimension of architectural knowledge is tacit. Given
the need for research to make explicit its methods and outcomes,
architectural research may need to include “an archaeology of the processes of
architectural production” (Till, 2007: 3). A significant component of my
research is therefore exploring and making explicit hitherto tacit dimensions
of my own practice.

Respect for the tacit structure of design practice prevents the isolation of
representation as an independent concern. The representations of spatial
design practice only make sense within the context of their deployment. Put
pragmatically, new ways of representing and working with the spatiality of
infrastructure can’t be arrived at outside of a design process. For this reason,
my research will advance through a series of case study projects.22 Because
architectural representations are not simply descriptive or denotative, but
offer new agencies and opportunities for action, they must be developed and
tested through design rather than as ‘pure’ representation.

Stan Allen sees practice as a contingent, “messy and inconsistent” negotiation

22
Flyvberg writes that case studies support “the development of a nuanced view of reality”
and ameliorate the shortcomings of “context-independent theory” (2006: 223). Stake
describes them as “the study of the particularity and complexity of a single case, coming to
understand its activity within important circumstances. (1995: xi).

26
with “a reality that is itself messy and inconsistent”. Characteristic of practice
is the existence of outside agencies, limitations, and variables that make
architecture “a discipline of circumstance and situation”. Practice takes on
fluid forms as a result of this circumstantial contingency: “The practitioner
looks for performative multiplicities in the interplay between an open catalog
of procedures and a stubbornly indifferent reality” (2000: xiv). Reality has its
own inertia or resistance (it is irreducible, writes Latour, 1988: 162-3).
Reality is infinitely complex and multi-faceted, and it must be encountered
as such in designing. The reductive proxies of the administratively
rationalised city, optimised for select criteria and externalising anything
inconvenient, turn away from this encounter, insisting on relative simplicity
— or at least that a set of relatively simple approximations can stand in for
reality. My research will not attempt to impose an extrinsic theoretical
framework for practice, but instead offer a means for new “tactical
improvisations” (xvii).

In formulating this research, the Pamphlet Architecture series has served as a

model.23 Particularly significant issues include Smout and Allen (2007; Fig.
17) and Bhatia, et al. (2011; Fig.18). Issues of Pamphlet Architecture typically
include several projects linked as part of a trajectory of research or speculative
practice. The format privileges dissemination of the work, and the
techniques and strategies of its production. The work is also typically unbuilt.
Allen suggests that architecture is a “material practice”, not because it
necessarily engages directly with bricks, mortar, and joist-hangers but
because of its negotiatory and future-oriented productivity; its speculative
nature. In proposing projects that will not be built, speculative design work
is similar to science fiction as Jameson describes it: an extrapolation and
reflection on real-world conditions and contexts (2005). In this way,
representational technique can be foregrounded, since it doesn’t exist in
expectation of being superseded by built form.

The research is structured around four project cycles. That design process
can be conceived as cyclical is suggested by Lawson, who describes cycling
back and forth through modes of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (2005:

23
Several other series have existed on the model of Pamphlet Architecture, such as
RIEAconcepts, edited by Lebbeus Woods (e.g. Jackowski and de Ostos, 2007), and the
Consequence Book Series on Fresh Architecture (e.g. Chard, 2005).

27
Fig. 17
Grand Egyptian Museum: Blooming Landscape, Deep Surface
Mark Smout and Laura Allen (2007).
Fig. 18
Water Ecologies / Economies
Infranet Labs (Bhatia et al. 2011).
39-40; ). Cycles or orbits allow for design to be understood as dialogical, in
terms of exchange rather than function, solution, or summation. In the
context of my research, they allow for the re-forming of research questions,
improvement through iteration, and the ability to explore alternatives. Just as
it is necessary to iterate versions of an architectural product, it is necessary to
iterate versions of an architectural process. Where two or three cycles might
suggest underlying binary or synthetic logics, four cycles suggest an open-
ended evolution of technique. Singular solutions are not assumed to be
possible or desirable.

In each cycle, the project will act as a design vehicle for inventing and testing
strategies (Allpress et al. 2012). Design vehicles will be determined during
each cycle, as a result of reviewing the previous cycle and of design
exploration, so that problams are able to arise through frm the design
vehicles, not simply find their solutions in them (see the account of problem-
discovery for Cycle 1, below).

The projects will be infrastructural rather than megastructural; that is, they
are unlikely to consist of wholesale urban megaform (see counterexamples in
Mostafavi, 2010). Emphasis will instead be on material interventions that
activate, facilitate, enable. That is, their material and formal qualities will be
understood as material and formal agencies rather than ends in themselves.

Site as case study: the Māngere Inlet

Auckland faces pressing questions of infrastructure as rapid growth highlights

conflicts between mobility, provision of services, cultural expectations
regarding living space, and protection of biological and topographical
contexts (Auckland Council, 2012). The M āngere Inlet (Fig. 19), an
ecologically-sensitive, historically significant, socially complex, and
infrastructurally dominated place encapsulates these difficulties and will be
the central case study of this research. While the primary value of the
research is in the techniques or strategies it will develop, a secondary benefit
of the research is in producing possible futures for the inlet, and for similar
sites.

Auckland's isthmus is the high ground formed between two river valleys —

28
Fig. 20
Manukau Harbour, nautical chart,
National Library of New Zealand (1853).
Fig. 21
Working map of Mangere Inlet (2014).
Fig. 21
Ancestral Waitemata and Manukau Rivers
(Searle 1981).
 MANGERE
Wallace Road

Auckland International Airport

Southern Maukau Harbour

Glenbrook Steel Mill

Mangere Wastewater Treatment Plant

Mangere Lagoon

Mangere Mountain

Otuataua Stone Fields

MANGERE BRIDGE
Maungataketake
Former Sewerage Treatement Ponds

HILLSBOROUGH
Awhitu Peninsula

Puketutu Island

MANUKAU
Manukau Harbour Entrance
Cornwallis

Ambury Farm Regional Park

Symonds Bay
Waitakere Ranges

Progressive Enterprises Distribution Centre

FAVONA
Blockhouse Bay

Old Mangere Bridge

Waikowhai Bay
Kiwi Esplanade Mangere Bridge / SH20

Mainfreight Dstribution Centre

Port of Onehunga

Holcim Cement Silos

MANGERE BRIDGE

Granny’s Bay

Hopua Crater
Mount Roskill / Puketepapa Mt Richmond
Westfield Rail Yards

Hillsborough Bay
HILLSBOROUGH

Hunua Ranges
Waikaraka Park

Three Kings Gloucester Park

Pah Homestead
Manukau Cruising Club

Maungawhau / Mount Eden

Metroport
Southdown Power Station

Mangere Mountain Hugh Watt Drive / SH20

EAST
Onehunga Bay

Maungakiekie / One Tree Hill

Largest non-volcanic hill in Auckland area. Mutukaroa / Hamlin’s Hill
HILLSBOROUGH
ONEHUNGA

Rangitoto Island
Mangere Bridge / SH20
ONEHUNGA

Ericsson Stadium / Mt Smart

Onehunga Mall
Waikaraka Park
PENROSE

Ericsson Stadium / Mt Smart

Fig. 22
Onehunga Foreshore Walkway

Panoramas of Mangere Inlet from Mangere

Maungarei / Mount Wellington

Mountain / Hillsborough Cemetery (2013).

the ancestral Waitemata and Māngere rivers (Fig. 20). This elevated ground,
formed by cycles of drowning, sedimentation, uplift and erosion rises above
the alluvial flats of South Auckland. For approx. the last 200,000 years,
intensifying over the last 40,000 years, the Auckland Volcanic Field has
punctured, cratered, and formed cones (Fig 21; Hayward et al., 2011). Along
the northern fringe of the inlet and the south-western border, the toes of
lava flows are still discernible in the inter-tidal zone.

The dominant iwi of the area were Te Wai-o-Hua, until the 18th century,
when they were driven south by part of the Ngāti Whātua confederation.24 A
major portage connected the upper waters of the Tamaki River with the
harbour (the Tainui canoe passed this way around 1300); the harbour was a
source of kai moana. European settlement of Onehunga as a port lead to
major infrastructural developments (Mogford, 1977). A shipping channel was
dredged, treated sewerage was pumped into the harbour; the portage route
was cut off by railway lines on reclaimed land, volcanic cones were quarried,
Onehunga was connected to the city by tram-lines, which were later
removed. Several bridges have crossed the mouth of the Inlet, including the
present six-lane motorway bridge. The bays of the northern edge were
reclaimed with landfill, producing a synthetically straight coastline, along
which a cycleway now passes. An extensive rail yard — Metroport — is the
main connection to the Port of Tauranga, which now competes with Ports
of Auckland to service the city. The areas around the Inlet have been zoned
for heavy industrial activities and include large private distribution hubs and a
coal-fired power station.

Infrastructure has thus been problematic for the inlet. The Manukau harbour
has served as a back door or service entrance in comparison to the Waitematā
harbour, which has been a site of recreation and public amenity. The inlet
thus provides an ideal opportunity to deal with the complex layering and
interplay of infrastructures and public space.

Problem discovery in Cycle 1

24
This is a simplified picture: there are at least six tribes associated with the Tāmaki area
(Taonui, 2012). Te Wai-o-Hua retain an interest in the area and established their
northernmost Marae at Pukaki.

29
Fig. 23
Offshore (Textile import facility for Marsden
Wharf, 2004).
In my initial research proposal, I had imagined that the techniques and
technologies of my practice, particularly representationally, would be more
or less adequate and thus they weren’t explicitly thematised. Although I was
aware from the beginning that my working methods were going to need
adaptation, it was unclear what directions this would take. To set a baseline,
I began with the tools I had to hand, continuing the method of transparent
work sheets I had previously settled into for projects like Offshore (2004; Fig.
22) Streaming (2006; Fig. 23) and the Afternoon House series (2006-14; Fig.
24). This method consists of working intensively onto a limited number of
translucent sheets so that erasure and revision is necessary for the project to
proceed. It also emphasises tracing and simultaneity of multiple versions.

Tracing over scaled and printed aerial photographs allowed for filtering and
selecting aspects of the site to highlight, adjusting the dynamic range of the
image to bring suppressed or invisible aspects to the fore, and de-emphasise
highly visible but perhaps inconsequential aspects. The technique favours the
discovery of axes, connections, and zones, and a number of these arose: for
example the line connecting Onehunga Mall, arcing around the raised tuff
ring of Te Hopua, diving under the SH20 bridge, across the old Mangere
Bridge, into the town centre of Coronation Road (Fig. 25). But this
approach was directly reminiscent of Haussmann's approach, prioritising
urban form and encouraging a schematic approach.

Compensating for this schematic oversight, I sought to confront detail,

considering the materials, forms, industrial and natural processes found in the
areas around the Inlet. This manifested as drawings of piers, seawalls, pits,
paths, landforms, tectonic details, and sequences of tectonic detail (Fig. 26).
Aware that I wasn’t yet confronting the infrastructural imperative of the
project, I posited that adaptable structures might act infrastructurally to host
and activate social activities. Sheds came to the fore (Fig. 27), with the idea
that they would host public workshops and maker spaces generating a new
kind of public use. The sheds themselves would bear the traces of their
various uses and reuses, and promote intersections and cooperations through
making.

At this point, I became concerned that I was simply redefining infrastructure

so that I could assimilate it into the existing ways and means of my practice.

30
Fig. 24
Streaming. Intelligence agency for an unspec-
ified city in a hot climate (2006).
Fig. 25
Afternoon House II. House after the Basilica of
Maxentius. (Douglas, 2009a: 61).
Fig. 26
Early map tracings. (2014).
Fig. 27
Mud Piers for Onehunga foreshore. (2014).
Fig. 28
Sketches for maker’s sheds on the Onehunga
foreshore. (2014).
My implements were fundamentally shaping what I could even conceive as
potential interpretations or actions. This initial archive of practice material
documents a coming-to-terms with these limits of my practice. From this
point, I began to understand the project through the lens of its
representational apparatus and consequent design space.

My first attempt to confront new representational modes centred on the

geological dimensions of the site. Since geological scales (in time and space)
are far outside what is typically acted on architecturally, this was a useful
dislocation. In documenting the geological activities that had yielded the
grounding conditions of the Inlet, the stability of ground as a datum
evaporated. Sedimentary material was washed off the coast of a long-gone
continent, then torn away as a shred of matter, uplifted, depressed, sections
improbably inverted, punctured with surfacings of magma, and rising bubbles
of granite. I produced sequences of maps that speculated about this far-from
well-known temporal unfolding (Fig. 28, 29); and fabricated a series of
timber detail models of selected volcanoes from the Auckland volcanic field
(Fig. 30). The designation and construction of limit conditions, horizons,
edges, and frames of reference became significant, and held potential for
addressing infrastructural entanglements.

I returned to infrastructure by imagining a path as a minimum infrastructure.

Technologically minimal (if they even qualify as a technology at all), paths
connect, producing order and circulation, providing directionality and
channelling movement (Ingold, 2000: 203-4; 2007). Embodying in a simple
form the complexities multiplied in elaborate infrastructures, I settled on
designing a path encircling the inlet, following a partly existing route. A
circuit, this path introduces a topology that my representational strategies
need to account for. Current work uses developed surface methods and
variable scaling to unfold the path and reconstruct its network of contextual
relationships (Fig. 31).

Subsequent project cycles may focus on points of interchange or transition

between two infrastructures, or on infrastructures of waste (Douglas, 2014).
In each case, the proposals are likely to be formally or spatially simple when
viewed from the perspective of traditional architectural representation; but to
be complex and active viewed through my new strategies.

31
Fig. 29
Geological evolution of New Zealand. (2014).
 -161 (1853)
-12000
prior to Maungarei / Te Tauoma
global SL ~60m lower and rising
datum contour corrected
no maungarei lava flow
swampy areas?
manukau river+streams
waitemata streams?

-28000 -31000
prior to waitomokia / panmure / prior to three kings / hopua /
rarotonga / maungawhau / mangere maungakiekie / otahuhu
global SL ~60m lower global SL ~70m lower
datum contour datum contour
swampy areas? swampy areas?
river path without mangere
reverse erosion?

Fig. 30
Geological evolution of Mangere Inlet.
(2014).
Fig. 31
CNC model of Motukorea (Browns Island) as
part of Auckland Volcanic Field series. (2014).
Conclusion

The total remaking of the Māngere Inlet and resolution of its infrastructural
problems is outside the scope of the project, and antithetical to my
theoretical approach. The infrastructural interventions I propose will tend
towards the minimal rather than the megastructural. I hope that by
establishing techniques for working with comparatively simple
infrastructures, I will lay the groundwork for more complex projects by
myself and others. I prefer to disclose the complexity and richness of
apparently simple things rather than impose spurious complexity.

As a provisional outline, the project work might consist of

Cycle 1: Circuit
Exploring the topology of loops and the spatial relationship of paths to
what they connect and the territories they traverse.

Cycle 2: Deposit
Exploring sites of disposal (landfills, reclamation, storage) as transitions
from the apparent closure of a system into externality. Horizons, blind
spots, and uncertain conditions of ground may feature.

Cycle 3: Exchange
Exploring transition from one infrastructural system to another. This
might take the form of a bridge or inductive coupling between the
infrastructures designed in Cycles 1 and 2.

Cycle 4: Distribution
Exploring distributed spaces, and the conditions of spatial discontinuity
and remote linkage.

The research is necessarily open-ended, however. This outline, as well as the

research questions and procedures outlined above, will be revised and
regenerated as the project unfolds. Through any revision, however, four
factors will remain in focus:

32
1. Resistance to approaches that suppress the complexity and
heterogeneity of cities in favour of their easy administration or design.

2. Infrastructure as the contemporary order of the urban, not merely a

component of cities.

3. A concern for public space, and interrogation of the interplay

between public space and infrastructure.

4. Critical and creative use of projective drawing and mapping to open

a design space for addressing this interplay.

33
Fig. 32
Failed projection of Mangere Inlet. (2015).
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