Jurg Conzett | Reticence and Ellipsis: the Architecture of Infrastructural Systems

Historically, city and country might have been framed in opposition, registering the city in terms of man-made vs nature in the country or in the productive rural against the consuming urban as well as many other pairs. North American cities of the 19th and 20th centuries already produced many versions of overlaps between the two territories. Extension of industrial land, suburban communities, and tracts of ex-urban development could not be envisaged independent of the metropolises that prompted their development. The city produced yet more versions of such territorial amalgamations that prompted description of the European landscape as a ‘cheese’ where the separation between the country and urban conglomerations are only matter of degrees of intensity. The 21st century city has seen yet more primary transformations in the relation between the two categories. We have witnessed how the availability of Internet and effect of the pandemic have speeded up the move back from the city to the country and "work from home" has blurred their distinctions. Recognizing such territorial blurs, the studio looked at the effect of development of architecture in the country and the city as a developed dialogue in the language of spatial design.