Strip a contemporary building down to what actually makes it function and you find fewer walls than layers: structural systems, mechanical systems, data and sensor networks, interface layers for controlling all three, each borrowed from a different discipline and stacked together without any of them being designed with the others fully in mind. The building is no longer a single coherent artefact so much as an assembly of infrastructures that happen to share an address. Synthetic infrastructure names this hybrid condition honestly, rather than pretending the building is still the unified object architectural language likes to describe. ContextReadymade applies here as it did to found footage, but with infrastructure instead of film: each borrowed system arrives already carrying its own context — its own standards, its own failure modes, its own maintenance culture — and the architect's real work has quietly shifted from designing form to negotiating among contexts that were never built to be compatible.
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