Infrascapes describe the entanglement of infrastructure and landscape, where systems of circulation, energy, and communication are read as ecological terrains. The term shifts attention from visible form to the underlying networks that sustain urban life. Highways, pipelines, and data cables become part of a landscape imaginary, revealing infrastructures as material, spatial, and political environments. Infrascapes blur distinctions between utility and aesthetics, foregrounding the poetics of systems. They expose how power is embedded in the infrastructures that shape everyday life.
When I walk in the city center, in parks, I feel like I’m in a kind of theater. The fact that these environments have been deliberately designed for me to find them beautiful is, to me, a problem.
But when you walk along an infrastructure, you know you’re in reality. You’re seeing the world as it truly is, as it appears to you. I believe landscape architects shouldn’t focus on cultural aesthetics. Instead, they should work with corporeal aesthetics—something much harder to grasp. Our job is not to create new beauty. Our job is to reveal the beauty that already exists. That’s a completely different approach.
The Nuclear Chronicles: Design Research on the Landscapes of the U.S. Nuclear Highway by Andrew Madl is an exploration of unrealized U.S. government nuclear proposals and their speculative impact on the western landscape. Through fictional narratives in a graphic novel format, the book imagines cultural and ecological shifts, illustrating infrastructures and economies that might emerge […]
Sara Eichner is a visual artist and designer with a keen interest in data visualisations and cartography. She works with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and programming languages like Python and uses design software to translate data into comprehensible visual stories. Her work is people-centred and she often uses data to represent less-heard voices. Eichner is […]
Bridges allow the landscape to flow underneath – or as in recent endeavours, in land bridges or ecoducts, nature flows over. In the latter, a bridge adjoins disconnected landscape portions created by cuts in the terrain. In any case, bridges form connections and links when a river or other barrier needs to be crossed. As […]
In this essay, Zaš Brezar writes about the role of urban roofs in our collective memory. Illustrating the meaning of roofs through a selection of cultural references from films and music. The article is a part of Living Roofs focus on Landezine that is going on in October and November 2022.
The winner of the LILA 2021 infrastructure category is Area development Ooijen-Wanssum in the Netherlands by H+N+S Landscape Architects. H+N+S already won LILA 2017 Office Award and we frequently feature their works. In the Ooijen-Wanssum project, H+N+S have, in their very own Dutch way, invented a new dike typology – innovative terrain modelling for more […]
Liam Young is together with Kate Davies running the Unknown Fields project. They travel around the world and explore landscapes behind objects we used on a daily basis: materials for our phones, fabrics for clothes, lithium for batteries … We caught Liam in Ljubljana, where he was narrating Unknown Fields film live.
In the past decade or two, roundabouts have become a wide-spread phenomenon in Europe, bringing with them a series of issues, above all related to their number, location, and the ornamental structures placed in their centres.
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