The word infrastructure is rarely associated with beauty. ‘Infrastructure’ connotes a bureaucratic and unpleasant world, one that is riddled with the anxieties of contemporary urban life. The concrete structures that house our day to day lives become lost amidst blazing sirens and ceaseless streams of activity. The beauty in the world we’ve created is forgotten.
While infrastructure must serve a practical purpose, a locale’s appearance—whether shaped by concrete mazes or by glass skyscrapers—has a lasting impact on the area surrounding it and on the people who live there. As is seen in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Japan, the future of infrastructure demands an approach that integrates functionality with aesthetic beauty. Today’s developers and architects face a dilemma: should they sacrifice aesthetic beauty for functionality or create new designs that preserve past culture while meeting modern needs? For the sake of our communities and their welfare, modern infrastructure must use architectural artistry to preserve a city’s cultural past before it surrenders to modernist aesthetics, political agendas, or scaled-down budgets.
Los Angeles: Combining the Old with the New