Jesse LeCavalier is trained as an architect, with degrees from Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree on retail logistics and urbanism at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. He takes part in the BMW Foundation Poiesis Fellowship program. Recently, his project group “Infrapolitics” undertook a field trip to New York and created the publication MILGRAM. In the interview Jesse speaks about Google, political imaginaries and about infrastructure that is changing our lives.

Jesse, you are a Poiesis Fellow and member of the “Infrapolitics” project group. How is the work going on? Have your expectations been fulfilled?

To begin, it is perhaps worth stating that we are a little over a year into the project so I have the benefit of a little historical revisionism when answering the question. Having participated before in interdisciplinary projects, I was optimistic about the arrangement of the fellowship but also guarded in that optimism, knowing that it can be quite difficult to find a common language or common ground on which to work. In the beginning, I really did not know what to expect, which I think is one of the great things about the project. We all agreed to the experiment and now, one year later, I find myself doing research about smart cities in India and Korea and having stimulating and challenging conversations with geographers, sociologists, and historians of science.

Recently you and three other young scientists visited New York…

Our project group began with a general question concerning the capacity for digital infrastructure to generate political imaginaries. We first try to better understand what digital infrastructure is, and then in a second step to examine what digital infrastructure does. We spent time researching sites in New York City related to the digital infrastructure of Google.  For example, we examined the company’s New York headquarters in the former Port Authority building. We also visited the site of a new data storage facility that is currently being built in an existing telecommunications switch building. 

Server farms and corporate headquarters are rather uncommon research objects, aren’t they?

The direct encounter with these sites was fundamental to understand the material in a more comprehensive way. By undertaking these efforts, we hope to better understand the ways in which digital infrastructure is affecting our daily lives and also to more fully comprehend its material aspects. For example, by examining Google’s data storage facilities, we can engage ideas like “cloud-computing” with a more agile stance, knowing that the ethereal imagery conjured by such branding efforts is at odds with the very material consequences of such shifts. Though we are increasingly confronted with images of digital communications as ethereal, they nonetheless have substantial material presence. The infrastructure of search engines, for example, includes software and programming of course, but also includes huge amounts of data, conduits to transmit that data, server farms to store that data, and governing bodies that can help to ensure that such data conforms to some standard of legibility.

Your research is based on case studies. You have visited Google in New York and you intend to visit Google’s headquarters in California. A trip to New Harmony, the Midwest town which was founded by Robert Owen as cooperative colony in 1825, is also planned.

These case studies are more to be understood as examples of infrastructure or infrastructural thinking in an expanded sense. They can also be understood as manifestations of particular organizational systems or as outgrowths of certain ideas or possibilities. For example, the desire to visit the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, is less an effort to discover an infrastructure there but to gain a better understanding of the physical and material consequences of increasingly ubiquitous information. Google, in this sense, is a representative for other similar organizations, many of which are having an impact on cities but in ways that might be less legible than other infrastructural actors of the past.

And New Harmony?

New Harmony presents a kind of social infrastructure; it was Robert Owen’s experiment in communitarianism and I find it interesting and relevant to this discussion of infrapolitics because the society’s design was attended by a very specific architectural design. In this case, the design for this new community developed as a prototype that could be repeatedly deployed elsewhere. Each of these settlements would be recognizable as part of a new society and – so the thinking went – would encourage others to join. The settlements can also be understood as a kind of infrastructural system capable of organizing territory. What New Harmony demonstrates, perhaps most fundamentally, is the capacity of people to generate alternative political imaginaries.

Your research seems to be characterized by a very broad understanding of the term infrastructure.

Infrastructure is more than just the large and costly installations we often think of when confronted with the term: roads, bridges, etc. For any of these infrastructural systems, there is the visible installation but also an institutional authority charged with overseeing and maintaining it as well as smaller-scale technologies to monitor and administer it. For example, in the early days of the railroads in the United States there were few standards that governed time or rail gauges. Only through the implementation of certain norms, e.g. time zones, and certain technologies, e.g. standard pocket watches, did the system begin to function in a coordinated way. Infrastructure is especially characterized by deeper structural choices whose influence might not be immediately evident but are nonetheless fundamental to its role and impact. Infrastructure organizes our lives by conditioning the sets of choices we have available. If this is the case, then it is also something whose design and disposition we can engage in order to more directly contribute to the shaping of a world in which we want to live.

What could this world look like?

This remains to be seen but one starting point might be to identify and challenge tendencies toward consolidation of power and resources, often through the control of infrastructure itself.

In your article “Let’s infratexture” you state that architects should deal with infrastructure rather than dedicate themselves to large-scale projects. You yourself worked on Walmart and its strategy of expansion.

I argue for a category of design that operates at the level of territorial organization while bringing to bear the skills and techniques of the architect. For example, my interest in New Harmony but also in Walmart is connected through the way each organization understands and deploys its buildings. By seeing their systems as possessing a certain kind of unity and consistency, each organization can deploy them more effectively in pursuit of their objectives. These goals might not always be so admirable, but I think they suggest ways to see architecture in a new light. I see this as a necessary direction for the development of cities in the face of increased privatization and bureaucratization. This is especially true in the context of the United States in which various crises of faith in government have made large scale attempts to improve conditions at more structural levels increasingly suspect. Attendant to this trend is a tendency to unwittingly cultivate habits of mind that are unable or unwilling to imagine things could be any other way. What we are losing by abandoning big plans, more fundamentally, is a collective political imagination.  Design is a powerful tool to address these tendencies by continually testing and experimenting with versions of the world that may yet be.

You stress the possibility to form the world via infrastructure. The Poiesis Fellowship deals mainly with cities. How should the perfect city of the 21^st century be designed?

We can only help things by devoting time, energy, money, and other resources to the rethinking and improvement of cities. But the ways to do this and the issues to address are almost endless. At the same time, I am not sure if it is even possible to “design” cities. What would that mean? How does design operate and where can it locate itself in urban situations? I mentioned above a fascination with some of these totalizing utopian projects of the recent past. This is a complicated relationship because the life they promise and the attendant images are seductive but there is so much more than design needed in order to improve the quality of life for people.

 

The questions were posed by Matthias Ziegelmeier.

 

 

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