EXPERIMENTAL CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE is a research group, consultancy and architecture practice working where dominant infrastructure is being contested, reworked and forced to change. As climate, ecological, economic and political crises expose the limits of systems designed to secure water, energy, land, food and everyday life, responsibility, authority and risk are being redistributed in uneven and often contradictory ways. Communities, Indigenous nations, governments, activists, engineers and institutions are experimenting with new relationships between technical systems, ecological processes, law, property, care and collective life. Some of these experiments redistribute meaningful authority; others simply push responsibility, labour and exposure onto those already carrying them. Often they do both at once.
We work within these contradictions. We learn from, take sides with, and contribute architectural knowledge to practices that reclaim, appropriate or transform infrastructure while remaining entangled with contemporary technology, media, law and finance. We are particularly interested in situations where people acquire — or are forced to assume — more direct relationships with the lands, waters, creatures and forces upon which all life, and the possibility of a good life, depend.
Practices like these recast infrastructure and Nature as architecture: constructed and particular forms of material and spatial representation, politics, and mediums of relationality that separate and connect bodies in deeply particular ways. The particular, dominant ‘typologies’ of today have emerged historically 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 recent decades, definitions, policy, funding and the production of critical infrastructure have expanded amid mounting and entangled climate, economic, social, psychic and political crises. States, institutions and corporations increasingly treat forests, wetlands and other living systems as infrastructure through terms such as green and blue infrastructure and nature-based solutions, while community knowledge and cultural practices are increasingly incorporated into resilience and adaptation strategies. Yet biodiversity continues to collapse, while many of these strategies remain tied to technocratic, solutions-based and expert-led frameworks that operate at a distance from lived and permanently changing relationships.
Dominant infrastructural logics continue to separate human and nonhuman life, dispossess land and water through property, and suppress embodied and situated practices grounded in direct dependency, shared vulnerability and attention to the rhythms, needs and limits of the lands, waters, creatures and forces on which we depend. But proximity, community and local autonomy are not inherently emancipatory. Direct relations can also reproduce exclusion, inequality, exhaustion and extraction.
Against, within and sometimes because of the failures of dominant infrastructure and property, a varied archipelago of practices is taking shape: culturally divergent ways of governing, maintaining, inhabiting and transforming shared conditions. These practices are not necessarily outside modern infrastructure. They often combine law, engineering, finance and technology with forms of knowledge, care, ceremony, collective ownership and direct dependency that dominant systems have historically marginalised or suppressed.
We work with these experiments, contributing technical and formal architectural knowledge to spatial and material practices that unsettle divisions between infrastructure and architecture, ecology and governance, ownership and use, play and politics, care and maintenance, expertise and lived knowledge, culture and nature, and human, land and water bodies.
Our current work includes commonly owned and governed waterscapes and infrastructures in Austria and Peru; movements reappropriating extraction sites, pipelines and data centres as spaces of political experimentation and collective life in the United States and Ireland; land buyback and restoration projects combining ecological repair with ritual, sport and architecture in Mexico and Scotland; and local infrastructure practices in Spain that turn pipelines and canals into sites of 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.