Issue 9
ISSUE
STORY TYPE
AUTHOR
13
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 4, 2024
How a Storied Printmaker Advances the Practice of Architecture
by Diana Budds
12
PEOPLE
October 21, 2024
Sounding Out a Better Way to Build
by Jesse Dorris
12
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
October 7, 2024
What It Means—and What It’s Worth—to Be “Light”
by Julie Lasky
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 23, 2024
Redefining “Iconic” Architecture and Ideals
by Sophie Lovell
12
PERSPECTIVE
September 9, 2024
Surrendering to What Is
by Marianne Krogh
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 26, 2024
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything
by Zach Mortice
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
August 19, 2024
What Does Your Home Say About You?
by Shane Reiner-Roth
11
BOOK REVIEW
August 12, 2024
Is Building Better Cities a Dream Within Reach?
by Michael Webb
11
PEOPLE
August 5, 2024
The Value of Unbuilt Buildings
by George Kafka
11
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
July 29, 2024
Future-Proofing a Home Where Water Is a Focus and a Thread
by Alexandra Lange
11
BOOK REVIEW
July 22, 2024
Modernist Town, U.S.A.
by Ian Volner
11
PEOPLE
July 15, 2024
Buildings That Grow from a Place
by Anthony Paletta
10
URBANISM
June 24, 2024
What We Lose When a Historic Building Is Demolished
by Owen Hatherley
10
PERSPECTIVE
June 17, 2024
We Need More Than Fewer, Better Things
by Deb Chachra
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
June 3, 2024
An Ode to Garages
by Charlie Weak
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 28, 2024
In Search of Domestic Kintsugi
by Edwin Heathcote
10
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 13, 2024
The Perils of the Landscapes We Make
by Karrie Jacobs
10
PERSPECTIVE
May 6, 2024
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence
by Jarrett Fuller
9
PERSPECTIVE
April 29, 2024
Why Can’t I Just Go Home?
by Eva Hagberg
9
PEOPLE
April 22, 2024
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?
by George Kafka
9
ROUNDTABLE
April 8, 2024
Spaces Where the Body Is a Vital Force
by Tiffany Jow
9
BOOK REVIEW
April 1, 2024
Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture
by Mimi Zeiger
9
PERSPECTIVE
March 25, 2024
Are You Sitting in a Non-Place?
by Mzwakhe Ndlovu
9
ROUNDTABLE
March 11, 2024
At Home, Connecting in Place
by Marianela D’Aprile
9
PEOPLE
March 4, 2024
VALIE EXPORT’s Tactical Urbanism
by Alissa Walker
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 26, 2024
What the “Whole Earth Catalog” Taught Me About Building Utopias
by Anjulie Rao
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 19, 2024
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization
by Ellen Peirson
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 12, 2024
In Brooklyn, Housing That Defies the Status Quo
by Gideon Fink Shapiro
8
PERSPECTIVE
February 5, 2024
That “Net-Zero” Home Is Probably Living a Lie
by Fred A. Bernstein
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 22, 2024
The Virtue of Corporate Architecture Firms
by Kate Wagner
8
PERSPECTIVE
January 16, 2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us
by Deb Chachra
8
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
January 8, 2024
The Defiance of Desire Lines
by Jim Stephenson
7
PEOPLE
December 18, 2023
This House Is Related to You and to Your Nonhuman Relatives
by Sebastián López Cardozo
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
December 11, 2023
What’s the Point of the Plus Pool?
by Ian Volner
7
BOOK REVIEW
December 4, 2023
The Extraordinary Link Between Aerobics and Architecture
by Jarrett Fuller
7
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
November 27, 2023
Architecture That Promotes Healing and Fortifies Us for Action
by Kathryn O’Rourke
7
PEOPLE
November 6, 2023
How to Design for Experience
by Diana Budds
7
PEOPLE
October 30, 2023
The Meaty Objects at Marta
by Jonathan Griffin
6
OBJECTS
October 23, 2023
How Oliver Grabes Led Braun Back to Its Roots
by Marianela D’Aprile
6
URBANISM
October 16, 2023
Can Adaptive Reuse Fuel Equitable Revitalization?
by Clayton Page Aldern
6
PERSPECTIVE
October 9, 2023
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?
by Mimi Zeiger
6
OBJECTS
October 2, 2023
A Book Where Torn-Paper Blobs Convey Big Ideas
by Julie Lasky
6
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
September 24, 2023
The Architecture of Doing Nothing
by Edwin Heathcote
6
BOOK REVIEW
September 18, 2023
What the “Liebes Look” Says About Dorothy Liebes
by Debika Ray
6
PEOPLE
September 11, 2023
Roy McMakin’s Overpowering Simplicity
by Eva Hagberg
6
OBJECTS
September 5, 2023
Minimalism’s Specific Objecthood, Interpreted by Designers of Today
by Glenn Adamson
5
ROUNDTABLE
August 28, 2023
How Joan Jonas and Eiko Otake Navigate Transition
by Siobhan Burke
5
OBJECTS
August 21, 2023
The Future-Proofing Work of Design-Brand Archivists
by Adrian Madlener
5
URBANISM
August 14, 2023
Can a Church Solve Canada’s Housing Crisis?
by Alex Bozikovic
5
PEOPLE
August 7, 2023
In Search of Healing, Helen Cammock Confronts the Past
by Jesse Dorris
5
URBANISM
July 31, 2023
What Dead Malls, Office Parks, and Big-Box Stores Can Do for Housing
by Ian Volner
5
PERSPECTIVE
July 24, 2023
A Righteous Way to Solve “Wicked” Problems
by Susan Yelavich
5
OBJECTS
July 17, 2023
Making a Mess, with a Higher Purpose
by Andrew Russeth
5
ROUNDTABLE
July 10, 2023
How to Emerge from a Starchitect’s Shadow
by Cynthia Rosenfeld
4
PEOPLE
June 26, 2023
There Is No One-Size-Fits-All in Architecture
by Marianela D’Aprile
4
PEOPLE
June 19, 2023
How Time Shapes Amin Taha’s Unconventionally Handsome Buildings
by George Kafka
4
PEOPLE
June 12, 2023
Seeing and Being Seen in JEB’s Radical Archive of Lesbian Photography
by Svetlana Kitto
4
PERSPECTIVE
June 5, 2023
In Built Environments, Planting Where It Matters Most
by Karrie Jacobs
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 30, 2023
On the Home Front, a Latine Aesthetic’s Ordinary Exuberance
by Anjulie Rao
3
PERSPECTIVE
May 21, 2023
For a Selfie (and Enlightenment), Make a Pilgrimage to Bridge No. 3
by Alexandra Lange
3
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
May 8, 2023
The Building Materials of the Future Might Be Growing in Your Backyard
by Marianna Janowicz
3
BOOK REVIEW
May 1, 2023
Moving Beyond the “Fetishisation of the Forest”
by Edwin Heathcote
2
ROUNDTABLE
April 24, 2023
Is Craft Still Synonymous with the Hand?
by Tiffany Jow
2
PEOPLE
April 17, 2023
A Historian Debunks Myths About Lacemaking, On LaceTok and IRL
by Julie Lasky
2
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
April 10, 2023
How AI Helps Architects Design, and Refine, Their Buildings
by Ian Volner
2
PEOPLE
April 3, 2023
Merging Computer and Loom, a Septuagenarian Artist Weaves Her View of the World
by Francesca Perry
1
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
March 27, 2023
Words That Impede Architecture, According to Reinier de Graaf
by Osman Can Yerebakan
1
PEOPLE
March 20, 2023
Painting With Plaster, Monica Curiel Finds a Release
by Andrew Russeth
1
PERSPECTIVE
March 13, 2023
Rules and Roles in Life, Love, and Architecture
by Eva Hagberg
1
Roundtable
March 6, 2023
A Design Movement That Pushes Beyond Architecture’s Limitations
by Tiffany Jow
0
THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
February 7, 2023
To Improve the Future of Public Housing, This Architecture Firm Looks to the Past
by Ian Volner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Radical Potential of “Prime Objects”
by Glenn Adamson
0
PEOPLE
February 20, 2023
Xiyadie’s Queer Cosmos
by Xin Wang
0
PEOPLE
February 13, 2023
How Michael J. Love’s Subversive Tap Dancing Steps Forward
by Jesse Dorris
0
SHOW AND TELL
February 7, 2023
Finding Healing and Transformation Through Good Black Art
by Folasade Ologundudu
0
BOOK REVIEW
February 13, 2023
How Stephen Burks “Future-Proofs” Craft
by Francesca Perry
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 27, 2023
Making Use of End Users’ Indispensable Wisdom
by Tiffany Jow
0
PEOPLE
February 7, 2023
The New Lessons Architect Steven Harris Learns from Driving Old Porsches
by Jonathan Schultz
0
PERSPECTIVE
February 7, 2023
The Day Architecture Stopped
by Kate Wagner
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
The Overlooked Potential of Everyday Objects
by Adrian Madlener
0
ROUNDTABLE
February 7, 2023
A Conversation About Generalists, Velocity, and the Source of Innovation
by Tiffany Jow
0
OBJECTS
February 7, 2023
Using a Fungi-Infused Paste, Blast Studio Turns Trash Into Treasure
by Natalia Rachlin
Untapped is published by the design company Henrybuilt.
PERSPECTIVE
01.16.2024
How Infrastructure Shapes Us

The notion that we make individual decisions about the ways we equip our homes is an illusion.

Illustration by Sam Pease
Black and white abstract digital collage of pipes and buildings connecting and overlapping


The laundry room in the building where I live just got a new washing machine. It is both perfectly ordinary and utterly extraordinary in the way that it is a nexus of infrastructural networks. For the washer to function properly, it needs be connected to five distinct utilities: Pipes deliver clean water to the machine and drain the dirty, sudsy water to the sewage system; the hot water comes from a heater than burns methane; a data connection to the telecommunications network enables electronic payments; and, of course, the whole system is powered by grid electricity.

While paying with a debit card might be convenient, what’s transformative is the motor, which converts electrical energy into mechanical energy—the movement of the agitator and the drum—replacing the wet drudgery of hand-laundering clothing with just a few moments spent pushing buttons and transferring the wrung-out clothes to the adjacent dryer.

One definition of infrastructure is that it’s all the underlying systems whose presence we take for granted when we start on something new. For the washing machine, it’s the power outlets and pipes in the laundry room. For a building, it might be the local electricity grid, a utility gas network, water and sewage mains, the telephone and cable links that allow the inhabitants to communicate with the larger world, and local transportation systems that connect to national and international ones.

We tend to focus on the nodes and the interfaces, on the points where we connect to the networks and how—and not on the networks themselves. But whether it’s a new washing machine, or an induction stove, or how we heat a building, or whether our next car is an EV or a conventional car (or whether we buy a car at all), the decisions we make about those connections and their potential uses are shaped and constrained by the infrastructural networks that are already in place.

Networks are intrinsically collective. Municipal water and sewage pipes are like an artificial watershed of streams and rivulets overlaid on a city, bringing clean water to buildings and allowing waste to flow away. Every time you flip on a light switch, you are closing an electrical circuit that extends out tens, hundreds, or even thousands of miles from the tip of your fingers to the plant where the power is produced.

Much of the value of transportation and telecommunications networks lies in the nature and number of connections between nodes: The more people who are connected together, the more valuable the networks become for each user. It’s a myth that we make individual decisions about how we equip our buildings and homes; any decision we make is embedded in the social and technological standards of these shared systems, in other decisions that have already been made.

These infrastructural utilities are the product of decades or even a century or more of investment and entrenchment. In the northeast United States, where I live, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, municipal distribution grids delivered locally produced “town gas” for lighting, heating, and cooking (think gaslight, those old-fashioned streetlights with candle-like flames). With the outbreak of World War II, a consortium of oil companies, funded by the war office of the federal government, crash-built pipelines to bring petroleum products from the oil fields of Texas to the industrial regions of New York and Pennsylvania, there to be refined into fuel and transshipped to the European theater to power the machineries of war.

After peace was declared, the pipelines were mothballed. But a bright spark in the office of the president of Standard Oil of Ohio had realized that they could be modified to deliver the methane that was released as an unwanted byproduct of oil production in Texas, where it was routinely flared off at the wellhead, to the energy-hungry northeast, generating profits by arbitraging the price difference at each end of the pipeline. The long-distance transmission pipelines were retrofitted and connected into the local gas grids. As the use of natural gas expanded, home heating and cooking became easier and cheaper (and safer—the suicide rate for women fell sharply when carbon monoxide-rich coal gas was no longer used in kitchen stoves).

Methane burns much hotter than coal gas, so, as part of the conversion, technicians were sent out to buildings, going block by block and door to door, throttling down every single burner in preparation for the switchover. Similar histories of intense public and private investment lie behind all the other major technological systems that support people and their development, such as water and transportation.

But these systems, built to provide for basic human needs, necessarily make it challenging to address those needs in other ways. The reality is that any seemingly individual decision about ways of connecting to these networks is constrained by collective systems that facilitate certain ways of acting in the world, often to the degree that to act otherwise seems impossibly hard.

And this isn’t only an issue of academic interest, a free-market argument for more individual choice. It’s a problem for everyone, because the majority of our individual energy use is mediated through these collective systems, not just utility gas but, especially, electricity generation and transportation. The energy that powers these systems still, overwhelmingly, comes from the combustion of fossil fuels, with its attendant greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why decarbonizing these collective systems is a key step in addressing climate change, and another facet of how these collective systems impact us all.

There’s a myth of individual action, that it’s the responsibility of right-thinking humans to decarbonize the built environment themselves: by replacing a furnace with a heat pump or a gas stove with induction, installing solar panels on the roof or a battery in the basement, swapping out a conventional car for an electric equivalent, and the like. And there’s a concurrent myth of individual inaction: The largest systems, if they’re considered at all, seem intractable, and so they’re somebody else’s problem to solve.

Eliel Saarinen famously wrote, “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” Focusing on individual-level action for infrastructural systems is a lot like considering a chair in isolation, or maybe like considering it in the context of a city plan: You might just end up with a bunch of chairs in an empty lot, purchased and placed there by the people who can afford to buy chairs.

What does the “next larger context” look like for infrastructural nodes? One answer is local- and neighborhood-scale infrastructural networks. This might include microgrids, which are designed to generate, store, and distribute electricity locally, and that remain functional even if the larger electrical grid is disrupted by, for example, severe weather. A microgrid might include neighborhood geothermal systems, like the pilot projects being built outside Boston in a collaboration between the local gas utility and community nonprofit HEET.

It might include neighborhood-scale septic systems, which are managed professionally rather than at the household level, providing an alternative to and transition between household septic and conventional waste treatment plants for communities as they grow. Or it might entail municipal commitments to renewable energy generation: In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city mediates between individual utility customers and the monopoly electricity provider, offering individual households the option to use renewable-only power regardless of whether they can install solar panels on the roof, with the electrical utility meeting the aggregated demand.

Abolition activist Mariame Kaba describes how we create social change by acting at the individual, community, institutional, and societal levels. Our infrastructural systems aren’t merely technological; like the built environments in which they are embedded, they are just as much about the people who use them. Considering the “next larger context” for the infrastructural nodes in our built environments means going beyond Saarinen’s dictum for designers by learning how to incorporate Kaba’s social contexts.