Editorial

Infrastructural works can demonstrate the profundity that simpicity enshrines. Superfluous layers are stripped away. Cliches no longer obscure. They also have the capacity to be much more than just simple solutions to practical problems. They demonstrate the poetics of modernity and so refocus our view of things around us.

Congested roads, inadequate public transport and a shortage of housing are also seriously affecting people�s quality of life. At a time when the Government has sanctioned investment of billions of pounds in the National Development Plan, splitting up the ensuing issues into chunks to be treated intependently by a multitude of separate groups will not suffice when the cohesion of the landscape as a whole is at stake. This will require a planned and co-ordinated focus. In this issue, �Building Material� gathers articles motivated by such concerns of infrastructure and its spin-off effects.

The creation of built environment, made evident by the current Planning Tribunals, is largely a process in which planning and infrastructure are obliged to accommodate themselves to the profit-based private-sector property development industry and the citeria for engagement of its actors (land-owners, developers, financiers, construction companies, politicians) and long-term investors. Otherwise, plans become merely wishful thinking and development does not take place.

In its new incarnation, Ireland�s urban landscape is now diffuse, sprawling and endlessly mobile. But for the architect and the urbanist to turn their backs on this new form, which is the backdrop to everyday life for the vast majority of people, is futile and self-defeating. This new species of city is not an accretion of streets and squares that can be comprehended by the pedestrian but instead manifests its shape from the car, the railway line and the aeroplane.

Inextricably linked with infrastructure, Dublin�s new �Edge Cities� in the form of peripheral and dispersed employment locations catering for industrial, retail and office functions represent further fragmentation of the Dublin metropolitan region and will increasingly challenge the economic, social and cultural vitality of the city centre. These functions have developed in the absence not only of adequate infrastructure, but of any serious consideration of how we can ever service them adequately.

The car, the road and the back garden are the holy triumvirate of twentieth century suburban living. To accept our cities� per peripheries is to accept uncomfortable things about ourselves and our illusions about the way we want to live. We need to recognise the periphery�s values and to discover the qualities it can have at each place. We have to face up to the challenges that the periphery creates where matter is still floating and where a lot of potentially positive architectural activity is happening.

So what role does architecture play in this new urban field? Is it secondary to the infrastructures it supports? As another actor in this urban landscape, architects need to demonstrate maturity where previously they operated in relatively simpler and more comfortable conditions. Insofar as all visible infrastructure possesses an architecture, this impacts on human perception. Infrastructures need to lose their specific, separate properties and be defined more by how you relate to them: zooming into solids, fluctuating along evanescent lines, space opening up around you.

Multi-billion pound investment into infrastructures of transportation and communications systems, water and power lines and institutions such as housing, determine the way Ireland will grow. These are not just planning briefs but real design briefs.