Infrastructural wrecks and landscape design

Infrastructure is usually conceived on the basis of two main criteria: functional efficiency, to cope with their tasks; structural strength and durability, to cope with stress and fatigue. Both criteria imply the concept of safety, and both are regulated by technical standards. A third criterion, which is not regulated, sometimes arises, i.e. formal research that turns infrastructure into architecture and allows the transformation of sites into landscape. While functional efficiency, and structural strength and durability are inescapably bound to meet obsolescence, regardless of maintenance and constant upgrading efforts, formal substance is resilient to obsolescence: ruins are still architecture, not debris, no matter their material decay. There comes a time when the efforts to upgrade infrastructure, to cope with increasing structural and infrastructural challenges, must be stopped and turned in attempts to downgrade it, to let it express its potential as landscape architecture.