EXPERIMENTAL CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE is a research group, consultancy, and architecture practice. We learn from, take sides with, and offer architectural knowledge to those radically challenging historical divisions between architectural, infrastructural, and ecological knowledge and practice. While mastering contemporary technology, media, and law, communities, activists, and Indigenous peoples are at the same time reclaiming local governance and direct, vulnerable, experiential and 'empirical' relationships with each other, and with the lands and waters upon which all life, and the possibility of a good life, depends.
Practices like theirs recast infrastructure and Nature as architecture: constructed and particular forms of material and spatial representation, politics, and mediums of relationality which both seperate and connect bodies in specific ways. The particular, dominant 'typologies' of today, have historically emerged from contests over, and the dispossession of ways of seeing, knowing, relating to, and living with each other, with land and water, and with the beings, things, and forces that co-produce them. When infrastructure fails it is unveiled as material politics: a form of politics that operates above and below traditional forms of speech and ritual politics and through which futures can be imagined, negotiated, and contested.
Over the past decades, definitions, policy, funding, and the production of critical infrastructure have expanded amidst mounting and entangled climate, inflation, social, psychic, and political crises. Beyond green transition technologies and data infrastructures, states, institutions, and corporations now include the construction of animal and plant ecosystems such as forests and wetlands, as well as everyday and cultural practices under terms such as green and blue infrastructure or nature-based solutions. Yet collapsing biodiversity - reductively described as the infrastructure of infrastructure - continues because these strategies remain tethered to technocratic and solutions-based logics, universalizing rationalities, and expert led frameworks that operate at a distance from lived and permanently changing relationships. Dominant infrastructural logics perpetuate an instrumental separation between human and nonhuman life, dispossess land and water as property, and suppress experimental, embodied, and situated relational practices and knowlege grounded in direct dependency, shared vulnerability, and attunement to the rhythms, needs, and limits of the meshwork of becomings upon which we depend.
Yet, a richly varied archipelago of culturally divergent and plural ways of worlding is always emerging from within and against dominant infrastructure and property, especially in places where it never worked, increasingly fails and threatens a diversity of forms of life. There, those who are bypassing dependence on dominant infrastructure are fast becoming the world’s preeminent architects. We work with these communities, contributing technical and formal architectural knowledge to collective experiments in spatial and material practice that unsettle separations between infrastructure and architecture, ecology and governance, right and left wing political ideology, ownership and use, play and politics, use and care, expertise and lived knowledge, culture and nature, and human, land, and water bodies.
We are engaging with commonly owned and governed waterscape ecologies and infrastructures in Austria and Peru; with movements transforming extraction sites, pipelines, and data centres into spaces of political experimentation and collective reproductive labour and living in the United States and Ireland; with land buyback and restoration projects merging ecological repair with ritual, sport, and architecture in Mexico and Scotland; and with local infrastructure practices in Spain to transform pipelines and canals into stages for collective governance, maintenance, and enjoyment.
The INSTITUTE FOR EXPERIMENTAL CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE was founded in 2024 by María Páez González and Brendon Carlin. The institute develops research and teaching in collaboration with the Architectural Association, University College London, RAUM at TU Wien, and the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Where research meets real-world infrastructure challenges.