The Icelandic Infrastructure: 2036-2056

Essay, expanding design practices, Future Real, Low Density, Michael Young, Territory and mobility

Aesthetic, Architecture, Architecture&knowledge, Australia, Climate change, Cultural agitator, Digital era, Distribution, Educational, Energy, Environment, Essay, Iceland, Industry, Infrastructure, Investigation, Land management, Landscape, Landscape utopias, Operative Infrastructure, Political implications, Production, Reality, Renewable resources, Research, Storage, Urban research

This essay by Michael Young is an excerpt from Future Real, edited by Nina Rappaport and Aymar Marino-Maza, published by the Yale School of Architecture from a Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship studio.

One of the responsibilities the discipline of architecture holds is for the aesthetics of the background of reality. This is a loaded statement, so I will offer a few thoughts on each of the main words. With the term background, I intend something close to Walter Benjamin’s observation: “Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”