Infrastructure in a Time of Flux: Methods, Conditions, and Situations Symposium
Harvard GSD - Piper Auditorium, Cambridge, MA
Infrastructure in a Time of Flux: Methods, Conditions, and Situations, an exhibition curated by Rahul Mehrotra and Dan Borelli, examines how architecture, engineering, urban design, and planning respond to a world increasingly defined by environmental disruption, political instability, technological transformation, migration, and rapidly changing patterns of habitation. This symposium brings together designers, architects, humanitarian workers, and historians to reflect on the exhibition’s three themes and a case study: Methods:This panel explores historic and contemporary approaches to lightweight construction: suspended, pneumatic, tensile, tensegrity, deployable, gridshell, folded, scaffolding, and spaceframe systems. Developed across different periods and disciplines, these methods use tension, air pressure, geometry, movement, modularity, and coordinated assemblies to create expansive spaces with relatively little material.Conditions:This panel brings together urbanists, economists, and political scientists to discuss the forces that continually reshape human settlements. These forces operate beyond the scale of individual buildings, transforming landscapes, redistributing…