Ep. 83: Infrastructure Aesthetics

The aesthetics of infrastructure are often treated as an expensive afterthought, noticed and appreciated only by artists. But can it even be beautiful to begin with? On this week’s episode of Silent Generation, Joseph and Nathan begin by discussing the four primary ways that infrastructure achieves beauty: engineering and design, paint, public art, and disguise (as is the case with stealth towers). Amongst other things they discuss how it is cringe when infrastructure is made to look like public art, how redesigned streets with painted bike/ bus lanes are a rare instance of society becoming more colorful, how many people assume that hostile design choices that impact homeless people are aesthetic ones, and how infrastructure built by the Works Progress Administration incorporated ornamentation and vernacular architectural traditions.

Links:

Around the Antenna Tree by Lisa Parks

A Prehistory of the Cloud by Tung-Hui Hu

How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra

Rust: The Longest War by Johnathan Waldman

The Danger of Minimalist Design

A Visual History of the British Telephone Box by Nick Sturgess

The Hand by Jiří Trnka

Places & Traces

'Ridiculous' Blue Seats Face Buildings, Don't Attract Shoppers, Critics Say by Mina Bloom

Ampelmännchen

Hall of Waters

Artwork:

Glenn Jackson Bridge aerial

Steve Morgan, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Recorded on 8/24/2025