Piece of (art)work: Infrastructure

The ouvrage d’art –engineered artwork – is a product of the engineer’s craft, or, as the Renaissance taught us to define it, the fruit of the art of engineering, at the intersection between empirical experience and theoretical knowledge. Witnessing the proximity – which, depending on the historical period, has been discreetly acknowledged or loudly acclaimed – between the world of visual arts and that of civil engineering, the ouvrages d’art are an invitation to explore this “liminal art”, or art on the threshold, with deeper sensitivity. They invite us to pay special attention not only to the aesthetic potential of the engineering work itself, but primarily to the articulations which may exist between functional, economic and aesthetic logics: the logics of an artful means of construction. The theoretical and practical contribution of the renowned Scottish civil engineer Thomas Telford was particularly crucial in this multidimensional redefinition of the art of engineering. He was the founder and first President of the British Institution of Civil Engineers (1818) and known as the “Colossus of Roads” on account of his ingenuity in devising breakthrough technologies for the building of bridges, roads and canals throughout the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries (Rolt 1958). In his biography written by his friend the Poet Laureate Robert Southey and published after his death, Telford continuously referred to the relevance of the aesthetic tension in the civil engineer’s work, and thus introduced a new approach to this professional field. According to Telford, this aesthetic tension corresponds to a continuous search for the “personal expression of the structure” (Telford, Rickman ed. 1838). Venustas appears when Utilitas and Firmitas are not compromised nor called into question by a desire to make art which exceeds the meaning itself of what seems to be an almost involuntary artistic practice. On the one hand, the Venustas of infrastructural works – as a form of beauty of machinic essence – seems to emanate from an expression of the structure which does not tend toward the accomplishment of a simple – or universal – aesthetic ideal (nor pretends to auto-define itself as a piece of artwork in the academic sense of the term). On the other hand, this specific form of Venustas, just like the artefacts created in the action field of the above-mentioned liminal art, seems to be permeated by a bundle of permanent tensions and contradictions.