Infrastructural Ubiquity: The Case of the Defense Highway and Space Complex

The design of infrastructure, and its systematic logistics, produces a ubiquitous rationality embedded in the appearance of politics. While the aesthetic and formal qualities of infrastructure can be criticized for being too rigid, focusing on functionality and structural performance, it is these very qualities that allow for its pervasive deployment. Not all architecture makes its appearance in this way. But, if we are to consider Mark Wigley’s provocation that architecture is as much of a discursive project as a constructed or functional one, an architectural act appears to be a repeatable and evolving political imaginary.1 Architecture makes its appearance through the repetition of image, structure, and landscape—revealing a politic as opposed to engineered rationality. This paper explores the relationship between two disparate cases of U.S. national infrastructure; the defense highway and space complex.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.107.115

Volume Editors
Amy Kulper, Grace La & Jeremy Ficca

ISBN
978-1-944214-21-0