Nexus, Artery and Reservoir: a taxonomy for an embodied perception of infrastructures

Infrastructures permeate all layers of modern society as the underlying structure for everyday life. The unfolding climate crisis and war on the European continent have put infrastructures in the centre of political attention. Infrastructures will also be pivotal to address several SDGs and key targets. Nevertheless, infrastructural artefacts are largely perceived as a necessary evil. This paper explores how infrastructures can be culturally perceived as more than mere technical necessities.
Through photographic works by the author, it is asked which aesthetic characteristics are distinctive of infrastructures, and how they can inform a new definition of infrastructures. Based on the photographic method of Bernd & Hilla Becher and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s phenomenological aesthetics, the image itself is considered empirical material with the potential to transform and expand the meaning of the depicted. This paper argues that a phenomenological, embodied perception of infrastructures is important to understand, engage with and derive meaning from them as structures, places and networks bridging the divide between everyday life and the often-intangible data of climate change.
Based on the photographic works and Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of potentiality, the paper outlines an understanding of infrastructural potentiality and proposes a taxonomy of Nexus, Artery and Reservoir to conceptualise infrastructures in the fields of architecture and landscape architecture.