EXPERIMENTAL CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE is a research institute, consultancy, and architecture practice which learns from, takes the side of, and offers architectural knowledge to those who are protecting, caring for, and reclaiming governance and experimental relationships to each other, lands, and waters upon which all life, not to mention the very possibility of a good life, depends.

Dominant concepts of critical infrastructure continue to shape policy and construction, ecological regeneration and protection, and disciplinary divisions in the interest of economic and national security. Yet they increasingly undermine the flourishing of life — the infrastructure of infrastructure — and thus the very conditions of their own possibility. Though, amidst crisis, definitions and the production of critical infrastructure are expanding to include animal and plant ecosystems, biodiversity, and cultural practices under terms such as green and blue infrastructure or nature-based solutions, they remain tethered to dominant, universalising, instrumental, technocratic, and expert-led logics and goals. They thus dispossess and shut down a wildly varied archipelago of experimental, embodied, situated, and constantly changing practices often grounded in direct dependency, shared vulnerability, reciprocal care, and enjoyment, upon which flourishing life depends.

We learn from and work with communities, protectors, Indigenous practitioners, and knowledge makers, together with architects, designers, scholars, engineers, lawyers, and artists, and offer technical and formal knowledge to experiments in spatial and material practices that unsettle conventional separations between infrastructure, ecology, and architecture; ownership and use; expertise and lived knowledge; culture and nature; and human, land, and water bodies.

Examples of those with whom we have engaged range from political and cultural experiments in commonly owned, governed, and maintained waterscape ecologies and infrastructures in Austria and Peru, to movements that transform technocratic backdrop infrastructures such as extraction sites, pipelines, and data centres into sites of experimental politics and temporary collective experiments in living in the United States and Ireland. They include land buy-back and restoration projects that blur boundaries between ecological and reproductive activities as they merge with ritual, sporting events, and architecture in Mexico and Scotland.

We engage with an ongoing redefinition of infrastructure as architecture: a cultural, political, and cosmological project that shapes how we see, relate, build, and live, and through which futures are prefigured and contested.

EXPERIMENTAL CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE was founded in 2024 by María Páez González and Brendon Carlin. It 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.

contact@experimentalcriticalinfrastructure.ch

Where research meets real-world infrastructure challenges.