The design of infrastructural networks is among today's most complex and most important design tasks. In recent times much attention has been paid to the new 'urbanized' landscape that has sprung up around infrastructural networks. Around the globe the importance of infrastructure as the motor of economic development is rising because of increasing mobility and need to make central locations accessible. Infrastructure is an important instrument for the design of public space and landscapes: areas around airport and railway stations, motorway systems and sprawling suburbs, traffic routes to shopping malls, access to industrial areas in the periphery and so on.
This book investigates how the design of infrastructure can actively influence the organization of the inhabited landscape. Infrastructure can be viewed as the cause of enhanced mobility, as a physical presence, as an initiator of movement and as a collectively shared experience of space. After identifying the conditions that affect them, these four characteristics are used in four chapters that construct a typology of the design concepts applied in recent practice around the world. Each chapter is illustrated with key projects by the world's most important designers, including Acconci Studio, Paul Andreu, Benthem & Crouwel, Dietmar Feichtinger, Diller Scofidio, Terry Farrell, Norman Foster, Grimshaw, Antoine Grumbach, Zaha Hadid, HOK, Arata Isozaki, Bruno Mader, Maxwan, Montgomery Sisam, OMA, Tonkin Zulaikha Greer, UN Studio, and Zwarts & Jansma