Our Infrastructural Loves

Abstract

Embracing a critical pedagogy of care and support in the teaching and learning environment of the architectural design studio, this essay discusses ways in which architecture can be reimagined via infrastructural love. By exploring infrastructural support systems we seek other ways of situating architectural design amidst contemporary environmental, social, and political crises. We have undertaken this work in collaboration with architectural design students by deploying a feminist ethics of care that combines interdisciplinary theories and practices. Our essay unfolds as an infrastructural rhythm of instructional prompts. In conclusion we present a concept that emerged from our studio: poetics pragmatics. Our Infrastructural Loves: Architectural Pedagogies of Care and SupportHélène Frichot, Adrià Carbonell, Hannes Frykholm, Sepideh Karami ESSAYIn this essay we collaboratively ask how understanding architecture in relation to infrastructure can help us rethink and expand architectural practices and pedagogies for a damaged, contaminated, and even a broken world. In our past design studio teaching in Critical Studies of Architecture, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, with its emphasis on feminist, intersectional, and queer theories and practices, we have been dedicated to infrastructural love and infrastructural care. These themes formed the foundation of two years worth of studio practice, which led to a further year of guiding students through their Masters thesis projects. The work we undertook together as a teaching team is now the subject of a co-edited book, Infrastructural Love: Caring for our Architectural Support Systems. 1 During our time together in Stockholm, and alongside our students, we focused our collective attention on the distributed architectural support systems that are associated with local and global infrastructures, small and large, material and virtual, visible and hidden behind the scenes of everyday life. With our students we asked: How do infrastructures and their architectural support systems hold us up? How do they fail us? Can we imagine architectural infrastructures from novel points of view, both human and more-than-human?Where can we, as critical and creative designers and thinkers of architecture and design, as students and teachers, intervene to support more inclusive, humorous, speculative, and sheltering infrastructures? By integrating theories and practices we explored connections between architectural spaces and infrastructural systems with the aim of critically responding to contemporary environmental, social, and political crises. That infrastructure increasingly demands our attention is plain to see. Through pedagogical means we argue that we need to collectively rethink infrastructures from the disciplinary point of view of architecture, and, further, that pedagogy performs as a kind of contrapuntal infrastructure with its rhythm of