The infrastructural complex : a return to big design

A new pattern of territorial settlement is proposed for the 70 mile-long strip straddling the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana (here termed the "South Louisiana-Mississippi River Corridor"). Current urban design paradigms at work in the area are ill-equipped to deal with the complex and competing systems within which the city of New Orleans-and any city sufficiently understood-is situated. It was a historical failure to engage with these big systems in the first place that resulted in the disaster of 2005. Such a truly big meshwork of competing interests as exists in the region can only be managed by a radically big re-definition of the scale and magnitude of the area in which design can intervene, harkening back to the territorial plans of the Russian avant-garde or the Tennessee Valley Authority. In South Louisiana, territorial infrastructure has always been the interface between systems and complexes, and it is only through a rapid redeployment of new infrastructures across a sufficiently big scale that a viable, long-term vision for the region can be realized, and only by applying architectural thinking.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Campos, Robert Timothy, M. Arch. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Alexander D'Hooghe.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39301

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39301