Infrastructural Evolution
In this piece from Metropolis, Andrew Blum looks at how America's infrastructural philosophy is evolving from "repair" to "renew".
"If Stammberger’s starting point is discovery, the photographs that result share another quality: a happy-sad mix of civic aspiration and the inevitable decay that follows. Precisely placed lights wash a dirty white wall. An elegant S-curve ends in the entropy of rocks and trash. His images don’t fetishize infrastructure but instead reveal its hard truths: The city begins crumbling as soon as it has been constructed. Beneath every new project lies the rubble of another.
In the United States today, that’s an important insight. Infrastructure is being revealed, in the sense that it’s attracting more attention than it has in decades."
"Maintaining our existing infrastructure is a totally insufficient task. We need a new infrastructure.
The hope comes in the form of Obama’s New New Deal—'the single largest new investment in our national infrastructure since the creation of the federal highway system,' as he announced it in an early-December radio address."
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