Emergent Infrastructure / Opportunistic Urbanism

Leveraging new investments in infrastructure provides architecture an opportunity to recapture its instrumentality as an agent in the creation of dynamic public space in the city. Rather than conceal or remove the infrastructures that serve our cities and feed globalized commerce, architecture can act as a catalyst—fusing utilitarian functions with civic programs—to both formally and conceptually reconfigure the way these elements engage the city and drive city form.

El Paso exists as the literal border between production and consumption economies that have come to define the globalized world. Current proposals would reroute the freight rails outside of the city to a port of entry in the middle of the New Mexican desert and would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to essentially erase the public awareness of these systems despite their ever growing presence in daily commerce.

The redevelopment of the central yard incorporates numerous architectural interventions that promote infrastructure as an asset and amenity that is a worthy destination for observation and education. These infrastructure nodes are further paired with complementary programs to serve the growing population of the city’s need for community spaces, educational programs, commercials zones, and recreation.