The Networked Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Art, and Planning announces a new book project, Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, edited by Kazys Varnelis, published by ACTAR in collaboration with the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design and the Network Architecture Lab.

The Infrastructural City maps the nodes and lines of infrastructure shaping contemporary life. These structures remain largely invisible to the public but are necessary for the functioning of the city. Like our subconscious mind, these infrastructural elements are themselves subject to drives and desires, being bound by highly developed bureaucracies (Superego), answering to powerful competing interests (Ego) as well as the mass psychology of the populace, shaped during long political histories, limited by the their own complexity and often at cross purposes with each other (Id).

During the modern era, infrastructural intervention was the foremost strategic instrument of the master planner, the means by which the city's dominance over nature would be assured and the chaos generated by the metropolis could be mitigated. Los Angeles was the greatest American example of this modern city served by infrastructure, sustained by water and power from hundreds of miles away, its inhabitants commuting vast distances smoothly, riding from home to work to beach on the freeway grid while a hostile natural world was kept at bay through the operations of the city's engineers. What other metropolis would name its most romantic mountain drive after the head of its water department?

Today, however, Los Angeles's infrastructure is in perpetual crisis and rarely responds to the plan. Instead, the city plays an endless catch-up game to keep the system at a steady state of near-breakdown. Infrastructure just barely works: traffic is always backed-up, the cell phone never connects, the sewer perpetually floods whenever there is a storm while water shortages and rolling blackouts give rhythm to our lives. Faced with this condition of permanent systems overload and the general futility of proposing new plans to a public fragmented into micro-constituencies, engineers now understand failure as natural and regard congestion as an integral part of the system. But if a populace determined to fight on for its own self-interest reigns in infrastructure's natural tendency to grow, infrastructure has its revenge too: it is not the limitless possibilities of infrastructure but rather its limitations that increasingly determine our lives.

The thesis of this book is that infrastructure's relationship to architecture has radically changed. Infrastructure has ceased to support architecture's plans for the city and instead subordinates architecture to its own purposes. Unlike architecture, contemporary infrastructure has little need for visibility and generally prefers to disappear. In this light, the city's recent bout of formalist monumentalism does not so much represent its aspirations as it serves as an alibi for the elimination of architectural intervention as a potential strategy. Buildings themselves have become less objects of fantasy and more the byproducts of building and zoning codes, draconian design review boards, the need to maximize the building envelope, and construction of the lowest common denominator. No longer the subject behind planning, architecture is now its object. But whereas architecture believed in the virtues of the plan as the great expression of rational and humanist thought, the plan architecture is now subjected to is blind and mad, produced by systems gone amok. It is as if we live in a post-apocalyptic movie set in which the ants and the cockroaches have taken control, rebuilding the world according to their own inscrutable, DNA-driven logic, but we are the insects as well as their victims.

If infrastructural systems answer to a higher authority, it is to the cultural logic of late capitalism, an all-pervasive and theoretically unmappable economic system. In this networked world, increasingly organized by flows of objects and information, static structures avoid being superfluous only by joining that system to become temporary containers for the people, objects, and capital that flow in and out of them. Los Angeles: Infrastructural City sets out to take measure of infrastructure as a way of mapping our place in late capital and the city and remaining optimistic about the role of architecture to understand it and affect change