ABSTRACT
The presence of massive infrastructure elements, such as highways, metrorail systems, or commuter stations, is a reality of the contemporary city. Contrary to the infrastructure of the nineteenth and early twentieth century-the Berlin Stadtbahn, Otto Wagner’s Stadtbahn and locks in Vienna, the 1930s works of Robert Moses in New York City, etc.—one finds few examples in recent history (the case of Barcelona is quite exceptional) where their colossal presence has been addressed in urbanistic or architectural terms. After World War II, the realm of infrastructure has all too often been relegated to the domain of the civil and traffic engineer, whose disciplines do not have the means to fully address the complexities-architectural, urbanistic, socialinvolved in planning the large city.
