Inhabiting Infrastructure

Edited by Dave Loder, Inhabiting Infrastructure is a research publication presenting a variety of modes and strategies for the inhabitation of infrastructure by staff and postgraduate students from the Interior Design Department at The Glasgow School of Art. Infrastructure is all around us, embedded in the ground, the buildings and even the air. A dense stratification of process, systems and mechanisms fundamental to everyday life, yet largely un-seen and overlooked. In the modern developed world, the essential condition of infrastructure means that it is paradoxically only revealed when its mechanisms cease to function normally. Our modern lived experience is co-constituted with infrastructure. It used to colonise the world and shape the world to our demands, yet infrastructure shapes us through doing so; infrastructure conditions us. Yet spaces of infrastructure are not designed for inhabitation by the human, we are alienated from them. These nonhuman spaces and structures constitute our modern human condition, but we are placed apart from them, through circumstances that include scale, distance and codification. The Inhabiting Infrastructure exhibition and research publication will investigate a range of existing infrastructural artefacts and conditions, and propose strategies of inhabitation for these more-than-human environments. These speculative proposals and experiments with be sited within an expanded discourse of decoloniality and anthropocentrism, framing the various modes of inhabitation to expound a critical discourse of un-learning and contribute to contemporary discussions of climate crisis, the Anthropocene and other concealed conditions that structure modern society. The research project will draw attention to the un-seen spaces of infrastructure that exist in the everyday around us, and award these artefacts of Glasgow with an urgent significance. This limited edition research publication was launched at the Inhabiting Infrastructure exhibition at New Glasgow Society, from the 9-12 June 2021, as part of the Architecture Fringe 2021 program. Contributors from the Interior Design department include; Melba Beetham, Dave Loder, Patrick Macklin, Digger Nutter, Jessica Oag-Cooper and Thomai Pnevmonidou. Contributors from the MDes Interior Design 20/21 cohort include; Ying Chang, Lyes Chikhoun, Shuyuan Deng, Wenfei Gao, Simran Gupte, Shanshan Jiang, Mengyu Jiao, Wenhan Li, Matcha Liang, Chuchu Liang, Yun Liu, Dennis Lum, Erin Moodie, Qi Qian, David Ross, Yang Shi, Ruby South Moffat, Wonder Wang, Unique Xia, Yijun Xing, Wei Yan, Caiwei Yang, Xin Yu, Jenny Z, Meng Zhang, Haha Zhang, Xinyu Zhao, Zhihan Zhao