20 m2 domestic urban space. Representing a 4.5x4.5 grid of an urban block comprising of 40 domestic units.
Divided Desires The Architecture(s) of Consumption
Consumption on the Urban Scale
Diploma Unit 7 Nour Hamade
FOOD WATER SHELTER
THINGS
A POTTED HISTORY London Medieval London saw food at its epicentre. Markets were centrally located and the acts of producing, selling, buying and eating were the main motives for socialising.
CARAVANSERAI A roadside inn built to shelter men, goods, and animals along ancient caravan routes in the Muslim World. The Caravanserai is one of the prominent building typologies of Islamic architecture; encompassing most of the daily activities for merchants and buyers. This is when the notion of building for trade became traditionalised . Directly linked to the former silk road trade routes, there was an extensive network of Caravanserais build along the whole route network in the middle east and central Asia. They supported the flow of commerce, information, pilgrimage, and people across the trade routes. This allowed for the extension of Muslim empires covering Asia, India, North Africa and South-Eastern Europe form the seventh until the nineteenth century.
ANCIENT FOOD MILES Hellas, now Greece, and Italia, the notion of ancient food miles began. The Mediterranean, Black, Adriatic, the Baltic and the North sea. The ability to obtain products that could not be grown locally (at the time) became facile. This demonstrates how early empires used the sea to create territories of logistics.
SUPERNATURAL Uli Westphal The ability to show, hide or exaggerate information on the origins or makings of produce allows for the consumer to be alienated. Thus, the role of marketing and packaging can be named the culprits of consumer-deception. Most consumers would not even recognise or question where or how the produce was manufactured and delivered to our local supermarkets. Here, Uli Westphal’s project, supernatural, shows utopian landscapes which are fabricated from the depictions of animals, plants and landscapes found on food packaging from local Supermarkets such as Asda, Morrisons and Waitrose. The individual elements of the image are cut out, multiplied, mirrored and rearranged into ever repeating patterns. The series studies the way nature and agriculture is portrayed by the food industries. It reveals an idealised, heavily distorted image of the origins of our food.
COLDSCAPE Nicola Twiley Coldscape, by Nicola Twiley, depicts the vast infrastructure of artificial refrigeration that, beyond our own kitchen fridges, is all but invisible to the general public, but that fundamentally shapes our cities, our shopping practices and the cultivation of the very food we eat. It points out the centrality of refrigeration to our overarching food system and to the perception of food as commodity in the modern West. Charting the monumental architectures of distribution and storage that are so alien to the people who eat those ‘freshly ripped’ foods. Carefully screened from public eyes and imagination.
TIME Today, as human activity gets more and more detached from its physical location on earth but rather move onto a digital dimension, the idea of a territory takes a new shape. Instead of delineating (di-lin-eate) a whole mass of land on a map to claim a territory, individual architectural spaces around the globe can situate themselves in a network, execute activities in synchrony, thus create their own time territory. The UK is situated on an island in the North Sea. Historically, the North sea was a mediator that allowed the different lands surrounding it to be connected via colonisation, migration and trade. The sea was the facilitator in creating these territories of logistics.
Time
4.5 HOURS Within the UK, there are over 1500 warehouse units and distribution centres, Equating to around 424 million square feet, these centres aim to serve the needs and desires of the population. Located within what is referenced as “the Golden Triangle,” the UK’s largest logistical parks include Dirft and the Magna parks. Lying between Leicester, Coventry and Milton Keynes, the parks are positioned for efficiency. Dirft is located perfectly between the junctions of the M1, M6 and M42 motorways, which means access to all directions is possible. With this location, 85% of the UK population is reachable within 4 and a half hours, which is the legal limit that a driver can drive for without a break. 4 and a half hours of driving at around 60mph equates to around 360km being reachable. Here, time is not only crucial, but is the facilitator of space.
LAND CONSUMPTION Within the ‘Golden Triangle’, the industrialised areas, the farmland, the meadows, the natural reserves, and the ‘untouched landscapes’ sit side by side, meeting at junction points, interfaces and thresholds. The only obstruction are these lines of infrastructure, splitting and dividing territory, claiming each space as its own function.
�e Golden Triangle
Land Consumption
A SHED THE SIZE OF A TOWN Located rurally as there are no limits on extension and size, here, time defines and creates territory. The fascination with these structures is the simplicity of design but the complexity in permits and size. Some of these superstructures are noted as nationally significant projects, where the national government had to give planning permission instead of the local councils. The area of land in which these distribution centres sit on can take up the area of a town; hence, the reference ‘a shed the size of a town.�
Scale
DIRFT
1945
2004
2009 A MODIFIED HISTORY
April 2016
September 2016
2018 A MODIFIED HISTORY
A LOST TERRAIN / A NEW TERRAIN In order for the logistical machine to operate smoothly, it must sit on a smooth surface. For the operations within the buildings; the trucks, machines, robots, racks and people must all sit on the same plane with no more than a 0.05 ° difference. Topographic features of an existing site are ignored then forgotten; the landscapes are engineered to a capacity that can create completely new terrain.
THE GRIDDED LANDSCAPE The land is gridded, and the building’s plane is too; each and every square encompasses a vital process that serves the logistical machine. The concept of a grid is employed and exploited, it is no longer utilised simply for a conception of a regular framework of reference lines in which the dimensions of major structural components of the plan of a building are fixed to, the spaces between the lines convey the important elements. Each square allows the machine to run smoothly, operate efficiently, and continue its movement.
�e Grid
A shed the size of the town
Today, the notion of surplus as a virtue is abused and storage becomes a mode of power.
PROCESS DICTATES SPACE. FORM FOLLOWS PERFORMANCE Albert Khan stated that “ The method of production should not be adjusted to the building, but the building should be adapted to the production.� With the rise in demand for immensely large storage facilities , there was a transfer of the seven principles of mass production, including power, accuracy, economy, continuity, system, speed and repetition, as target variables of Taylorism, to architectural design. Here, the space of capitalism and consumerism are manufactured. Commercial demands for efficiency and frugality were fulfilled at the same time as maximum functional flexibility. The processes that would occur in the distribution centre dictate how large the space must be. Simply, here is where the virtual becomes reality; where the internet becomes physical.
Space of Desire
THE PLATFORM The platform, acting like a plinth, is raised by 1.2m in order for the incoming (and outgoing) delivery trucks to be at the same plane as the operations within the centre. Every item that sits in a box, on a shelf, on a rack, on the floor is exhibited as a mean of displaying the demands of the consumer.
Platformance
ROW 1 - SHELF A Data centres; A space where humans and machines ensure that the logistical machine is running smoothly. Desires are measured, demands are monitories and supplies are fed. What we require first is the easiest to reach, on the first row, on the first shelf; 1-A.
Controlling Desires
COMPONENTS The components that make up the raised platform of the distribution centre. The importance of the straight line and the plane - the components sitting on one single surface, occupying the space, functioning together and separately in order to run the machine.
0
1.2 Metres
1
2
5m
OBJECTS OF FULFILMENT The spatial implications of the logistical machine are vitally significant; ultimately making up the commodity chain. A computer; the internet that allows us to have the unlimited possibility of choice and customisation. An avocado; the food that we desire, alienated from its place of production. The platform and the truck that delivers products from port to warehouse, and warehouse to consumer. The data centre, in which our desires can remain monitored and our demands can be processed. A warehouse rack, a pallet truck, a pallet, a box, and at the epicentre of all this lies the consumer; myself the object that encompasses every process of our desire
THE CITY AS A BARRIER Today, the concept of time and space is made abstract. The modern worker is constrained; the obsessions and pressures of maintaining a balanced lifestyle and attempting to ration their time between work, health and recreation is a challenge. The rapidity of infrastructural growth is accelerated, the system adapts to the infrastructure whilst it’s creating new, more efficient ones. Distance becomes so manipulated that the machine sits in the city, absorbing it whole - then, we begin to serve the machine. The London Metropolitan area introduces a new obstacle compared to the mass infrastructure of rural England. Congestion zones, zero carbon emission zones, strict speed limits and physically smaller routes limit the speed of the moving truck, interfering in efficiency.
0 mph 5 mph 10 mph 15 mph 20 mph 25 mph 30 mph 40 mph 45 mph 50 mph 60 mph 70 mph
0 mph 5 mph
URBAN MACHINE London From the rural to the urban, as the logistical machine infiltrates the spaces of the city, local depots become realised. Miniature distribution centres that serve consumers within their areas. Products travel from land, to sea, to land and to these multi-scalar spaces before reaching the shelves of the consumer.
DEPOT
DEPOT
RADIUS As the products reach their spaces of consumption, these local depots encompass the same abstraction as the specifically calculated sites of the distribution centres. Their radii engulf the surrounding homes of city dwellers where the desire to consume and own has become the desire to desire.
Serve
HOUSE TYPOLOGY London Learning housing typologies in London; as the project reaches the urban scale, the domestic scale and its related taxonomies begin to emerge. The terraced house, the semi-detached, the detached and the block compose the urban fabric of London.
Typology
URBAN TYPOLOGY London The row house - the measurement of one street, one system. The project starts by creating a system that operates from the street scale, the urban block. Looking at the different arrangements of the row house within the city and understanding the unit size and system. In looking at the spatial elements of the distribution centre and ultimately introducing it to the domestic scale where space performs both as a barrier and a performer and accelerator.
Block Typology