Contents.
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Introduction
Networks Produce Space
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Thought Fragments Telegram From Nowhere The Architectural Reconstruction of Geography Junk - Space Fragments of Net - Theory
Evolution
Histories
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Urbanism on Demand: The City as Service Platform - THE CITY FedEx: We Can Get It To You Yesterday THE AMERICAN CITY - Generica THE AMERICAN CITY - Television: The Infrastructural Revolution
Transition
Interface
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The Loading Dock Ground Birth of Uncertain Space Control Space
Projection
Farewell Address
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End of the Supply Chain - Consumers Gone Wild Connected Commerce Bigger Boxes Retail in the Age of Amazon
Provocation
Works Cited
Potentials
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Introduction:
Networks Produce Space We live in an era of extreme mobility made possible by technological innovation, globalization, and logistics. The city has always been shaped by production and distribution flows, from the trade routes of the middle ages to the steamship, from the telegraph, to the railroad, to the automobile. Nevertheless, since the 1970’s a new set of time-space networks have been radically reorganizing the built environment and recalibrating how we live. These networks manage the fast and efficient flows of products, people and information across cities, regions, and nations. By examining logistical networks post 1970, their effects on the built environment and their implications for architecture and urbanism, we can see how these networks shape the city, and more importantly, identify new protocols to address the hyper-mobility that characterizes much of how we live today.1 In the realm of manufacturing, the flow of material is dictated by new global economic regimes based on international production and distribution. Goods are made in one part of the world and transported to another for distribution to the consumer. It is hard to separate logistics from any aspect of our lifestyle. Logistics makes it possible for us to order a pair of shoes from our home and have them delivered to our doorstep. Logistics
allows us to drop a package in a drop-box and we know it will arrive at its mark destination in 2-7 business days. As citizens we participate more and more in a large range of complex flows, and all of us now depend on the mobility and convenience that logistics facilitates. Despite this overwhelming mobility that characterizes our daily life, there are surprisingly few methodologies in place to analyze the production of space via distribution networks. The job of logistics is to organize flows through roles of management and transfer, which could provide a productive lens to explore how networks produce space.
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How might design see the city
differently through logistics?
. s t n gme
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u o h T
a r F ght
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Telegram From Nowhere: [ Mckenzie Wark ]
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[ Mckenzie Wark]
Telegram From Nowhere
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[ Mckenzie Wark]
Telegram From Nowhere
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[ Mckenzie Wark]
Telegram From Nowhere
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[ Mckenzie Wark]
Telegram From Nowhere
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[ Mckenzie Wark]
Telegram From Nowhere
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The Architectural Reconstruction of Geography [ David Gissen ]
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Junk - Space Logan Airport: a world - class upgrade for the 21st century (Late 20th century billboard) [ Rem Koolhaus ]
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Signs & Signifiers
Logistic Spatial Domains
of
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[ Nadia Tazi ]
Fragments of Net-Theory
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[ Nadia Tazi ]
Fragments of Net-Theory
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[ Nadia Tazi ]
Fragments of Net-Theory
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[ Nadia Tazi ]
Fragments of Net-Theory
Histories.
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Evolution:
History Introduction
Over the last fifty years the West has completed the move from an industrial to a post-industrial economy. This economic transformation is often described as the shift from the industrial mass production of goods through repetition of tasks in an assembly-line model, to postFordism. This term ‘post-Fordism’ is loosely defined as a more flexible form of production where goods can be customized in response to consumer markets with lower manufacturing costs and smaller runs of different products. This, combined with faster, cheaper, and more coordinated distribution options, allows companies to produce in one place, assemble in another, and distribute somewhere else. This new organization of the Western world, or post-Fordism; information, service network or knowledge based society all implies an increased network of mobility across local, regional and global territories. This combined with e-trading, larger high-speed travel networks, on-line retail and overnight shipping networks has made logistics central to the global compression of time and space, which Castells defines as “space of flows” . Logistics can both mediate these relations and offers a mechanism to visualize the changes postFordism prompts. The study of logistics is a constructive exercise toward understanding how new production
regimes and their ensuing flows arrange the built environment. One of these case networks that encompasses many of the attributes associated with post-Fordism is FedEx, and how it relies heavily on both information and physical infrastructure, creating both a soft and hard system. FedEx and other similar entities emerge as viable models for urban production because of its responsiveness to user demands, the functional handling of complex flows, the synthesis of multiple layers of data, and its strategic long and short-term thinking.
Mass production!
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Evolution:
History Over the last fifty years the West has completed the move from an industrial to a post-industrial economy. This economic transformation is often described as the shift from the industrial mass production of goods through repetition of tasks in an assembly-line model, to postFordism. This term ‘post-Fordism’ is loosely defined as a more flexible form of production where goods can be customized in response to consumer markets with lower manufacturing costs and smaller runs of different products. This, combined with faster, cheaper, and more coordinated distribution options, allows companies to produce in one place, assemble in another, and distribute somewhere else. This new organization of the Western world, or post-Fordism; information, service network or knowledge based society all implies an increased network of mobility across local, regional and global territories. This combined with e-trading, larger high-speed travel networks, on-line retail and overnight shipping networks has made logistics central to the global compression of time and space, which Castells defines as “space of flows” . Logistics can both mediate these relations and offers a mechanism to visualize the changes postFordism prompts. The study of logistics is a constructive exercise toward understanding how new production
regimes and their ensuing flows arrange the built environment. One of these case networks that encompasses many of the attributes associated with post-Fordism is FedEx, and how it relies heavily on both information and physical infrastructure, creating both a soft and hard system. FedEx and other similar entities emerge as viable models for urban production because of its responsiveness to user demands, strategic long and short-term thinking, and the functional handling of complex flows.
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Urbanism On Demand: The City as Service Platform [ Claire Lyster ]
“The fine arts of traffic management should be studied no less than the fine arts of parks and boulevards.” — Daniel Burnham 1 “The fine arts of traffic management should be studied no less than the fine arts of parks and boulevards.” — Daniel Burnham 1
The reality of post-Fordist culture is that services have replaced things. city must no longer beculture conceived asservices a purely have formal artifact things. but The reality of post-Fordist is that replaced instead tono a platform, communication system that is generated The cityakin must longer beaconceived as a purely formal artifact but by synergies between harda infrastructure, information systems and instead akin to a platform, communication system that is generated architectural thathard supports the rangeinformation of routines,systems lifestylesand and by synergies space between infrastructure, experiences globalization hasthe to offer. architectural that space that supports range of routines, lifestyles and experiences that globalization has to offer.
[ Claire Lyster ]
So you need a pair of shoes. No problem. Using your tablet, you click onto eBay or Amazon, where most likely there are hundreds of options So you need a pair of shoes. No problem. Using your tablet, you click to choose from. After a short time browsing, sorting and re-sorting onto eBay or Amazon, where most likely there are hundreds of options results by color, size, price and heel height, you select a pair and hit the to choose from. After a short time browsing, sorting and re-sorting checkout button. The shoes are for a party on Saturday night — best results by color, size, price and heel height, you select a pair and hit the to select priority shipping, as you want them to be on time. Who checkout button. The shoes are for a party on Saturday night — best cares where they come from once they arrive, and no need to worry, to select priority shipping, as you want them to be on time. Who for if they don’t fit, just send them back. In fact, you might order two cares where they come from once they arrive, and no need to worry, pairs just in case. Logistics is a two-way system and change of mind for if they don’t fit, just send them back. In fact, you might order two is permitted. A confirmation email arrives in seconds. The shoes will pairs just in case. Logistics is a two-way system and change of mind be on your doorstep in twenty-four hours. You have no idea how all is permitted. A confirmation email arrives in seconds. The shoes will this works, and let’s be honest — you don’t really care. You are “black be on your doorstep in twenty-four hours. You have no idea how all boxed,” a term used to describe how you and the vast majority of the this works, and let’s be honest — you don’t really care. You are “black capitalist world are slaves to regimes that you know nothing about. boxed,” a term used to describe how you and the vast majority of the For better or worse, at no point in history has the machine become capitalist world are slaves to regimes that you know nothing about. so abstract, with such a large gap between production and consumpFor better or worse, at no point in history has the machine become tion. Yet, this is a contradiction of sorts; on the one hand, we live in so abstract, with such a large gap between production and consumpa physical world of shrinking space and unprecedented proximity — a tion. Yet, this is a contradiction of sorts; on the one hand, we live in global village — while on the other, we have never been so removed, a physical world of shrinking space and unprecedented proximity — a socially (and intellectually) speaking, from the way it works. Anyway, global village — while on the other, we have never been so removed, all done, and now for your groceries. Peapod is bookmarked, so no socially (and intellectually) speaking, from the way it works. Anyway, need to browse the virtual supermarket aisles; after all, you always all done, and now for your groceries. Peapod is bookmarked, so no order the same list of things. You hit “accept” and pay, keying in need to browse the virtual supermarket aisles; after all, you always the sixteen-digit Visa number you’ve memorized. Shopping is done order the same list of things. You hit “accept” and pay, keying in the sixteen-digit Visa number you’ve memorized. Shopping is done
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in three minutes, so there is time to open the Netflix envelope that arrived earlier. You’ve been looking forward to Deadhead Miles. 2 Logistics makes things so convenient, the response-speed interval previously limited to the remote control is now extended beyond the TV to affect almost all your work, social and household interactions. How did you get by before now?
Urbanism On Demand It’s not entirely unreasonable to think that one could sit back at a computer or phone and order everything online. No need to stand in line at the grocery store and drag produce home. No need to negotiate the hoards of shoppers on a Saturday afternoon. Even those who like shopping will succumb to what Paul Virilio calls the “law of least action,” 3 and so far the numbers only serve to confirm this. Over the past five years Americans have increasingly elected to purchase holiday gifts online, spending in the region of $46.5 billion during the 2013 holiday season (November and December). Cyber Monday, typically the busiest e-retail day of the year, also did not disappoint; with total sales of $2.29 billion, it became the highest-grossing day of online sales ever recorded in the US, an increase of 16 percent from 2012. 4 And in expanding beyond material goods into the provision of services and entertainment via online business, social and entertainment networks, e-commerce brings — or to use a computer term, streams — the city to our living room or workplace, indulging us with so many choices in one location that it facilitates a sort of urbanism on demand. Not unlike Instant City (1969), a speculative urban proposal by the British firm Archigram, e-commerce engineers multiple retail environments simultaneously. Archigram’s project deployed airships filled with technological gizmos to create spontaneous entertainment zones in sleepy English towns, providing immediate access to an infinite array of consumer options at any time 5 . While e-commerce’s online interfaces have replaced the airship, the idea to instigate what Archigram called “instant metropolitization” is the same. Instant City is no longer a fabrication from the 1960s, but has become reality courtesy of logistical systems that link digital information technologies
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with global transportation networks to bridge the gap between supply and consumption. The subject of this new urban condition — the digital flaneur — has unlimited freedom of choice in what he or she eats, watches and purchases and how he or she relaxes and travels. This new Instant City is made possible by the production regimes of the post-Fordist era, including advanced information systems (from the barcode to the Internet), technological devices, and the efficient manufacturing, ordering, storing and transferal of goods and services worldwide facilitated by logistical operators, many of which are featured in this book, from FedEx to Facebook, from eBay to Google, from Peapod to Expedia and from Netflix to LinkedIn. But how do you characterize On-Demand Urbanism? Is it a physical place? Is it a website? Is it an information portal? Is it a cultural space? Is it an infrastructural system? The answer is that it’s all of these, and this is clearly explained by focusing on one of the main actors of the instant city, Amazon.com, the world’s largest and most popular online retailer and the epitome of contemporary logistical intelligence. Since its inception in 1994, it has restructured the retail industry and the culture of shopping. Not only does Amazon provide access to millions of popular products from diapers to electronics, and now food;6 it allows us to make price comparisons and read reviews, it offers a variety of shipping options, it provides opportunities to browse similar products in a specific category, it lets us purchase gifts to send to another part of the world and arranges their timely delivery, it provides entertainment, and it allows us access to business infrastructures. It might help to visualize Amazon by conjuring up an image of an old telephone switchboard where an operator routed calls by inserting a cable into a jack, connecting two remote entities in conversation. The switchboard was a primitive interface that gave users access to a larger world through (literal) connections. Amazon is a contemporary version of this; its real expertise is in connecting users with the numerous constituencies in its supply chain, from users to distributors to shippers, to increase the volume and types of exchange and the functionality of its operation. Amazon’s super-switchboard relies on a multi-tiered integrated interface built on the exquisite rendezvous and seamless synthesis of soft systems, proprietary technological devices, hard infrastructure (including architectural space), and a large, enthusiastic population (approximately 80 million Americans shop on [ Claire Lyster ]
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Amazon every month).7 A brief description of some of these aspects might help further articulate the traits of on-demand urbanism and how it operates. Amazon’s website, created by customizing open-source software available in the mid-1990s, was designed to serve both its front- and backstage operations. Initially, this meant managing a database of 1 million book titles and book descriptions, processing orders, generating billing, proposing shipping options and storing transaction histories and, later, customer preferences. Together these activities were presented through a public interface that could be manipulated directly by users (for example, it was one of the first websites to use icons as orientation tools). In other words, Amazon’s website was not only an in-house tool to control operations but an instrument of access that connected the user to the larger web of online commerce. Equally important, its shopping portal behaved like an online community, enabling browsing and chatting (customers emailed advice about and reviews of books that were posted online) as well as purchasing. For many, Amazon was a gateway to the complex code space of the Internet, rendering it a cultural space as much as a technological one.8 Much later, in 2007, Amazon.com introduced the Kindle, an e-reader that not only changed how people read but also ensured that Amazon — the exclusive supplier of material for the product — would become an entertainment gateway as well. Not unlike the website, James Bridle writes, “The Kindle” connects the reader to a carefully, algorithmically managed world, a code/space that affects reader and reading, and ultimately writing and literature.” 9 By 2012, the Kindle had facilitated access to over 23 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, books, audiobooks and popular apps and games. Its “Lending Library” has grown to over 800,000 books, which Kindle owners with an Amazon Prime membership can borrow for free with no due dates.10 In the late 1990s Amazon began a workspace exchange called Amazon Web Services that provides on-demand IT resources and software products for a fee. This means that Amazon is no longer only a supplier for personal shopping and entertainment but also hosts business services and cloud-based infrastructure (in the industry this is called “Infrastructure as a Service,” or IaaS) for the public and even other logistical corporations.11 Making these amenities even more accessible is a range of proprietary gadgets. Recently, the company
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began testing a prototype “shopping wand” called Dash, which allows customers to order food items directly to their account on AmazonFresh, Amazon’s food delivery service, by scanning products in their homes. Simply wave the device over the barcode of a product and it is instantaneously added to your shopping list. Alternatively, if you don’t want to scan the information, you can just say the word. Amazon’s pitch for the device is that you can “shop effortlessly all day.” Echo is a product based on voice recognition and takes the form of a small tubular speaker that can be placed anywhere in the home. It hears you when you ask questions and will answer you back. It is connected to Amazon Web Services, so it has an unlimited knowledge base, it’s like living with a talking brain. And that’s not all. In January 2014, an episode of the television show 60 Minutes aired news of Amazon’s research into the use of “Octocopters” to transport goods within a 10-mile (16-kilometer) radius of a fulfillment center. Amazon has tested these drones as a conveyance platform at one of its centers in Virginia and claims the initiative is plausible since 86 percent of items sold on Amazon items weigh less than five pounds.12 On-demand urbanism is also supported by physical (architectural) spaces and transportation conduits. The fulfillment center is Amazon’s name for its warehouses and distribution centers that store products for the company and its third-party suppliers. At the time of writing, Amazon has 139 of these facilities around the world totaling over 90 million square feet (9 million square meters) of space (figure 4.1).13 The data center is the second physical space of Amazon’s operation, storing massive amounts of information for the company as well as its cloud customers. Currently there are data centers in Tokyo, Singapore, São Paolo, Northern California, Northern Virginia and Dublin, Ireland, with a dedicated data center for US federal records in Oregon in the northwestern United States. These large data centers are supported by seven other software centers worldwide. In terms of distribution, Amazon creates synergies with other logistical operators, for example with FedEx and UPS, shipping companies that are essential to its functionality. And so tablets, clouds, robots, wands, brains, drones, warehouses, data centers, planes and trucks merge as fibers woven into a continuous fabric — a fabric formed from a mélange of hard, soft and physical bits and pieces that grants users convenient and immediate access [ Claire Lyster ]
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to other worlds, heterotopias of global production and communication that alleviate us from the mundane routines of daily life. This access-purchasing whatever we want from the comfort of our home or office and having it delivered directly to our media device or doorstep has already transformed the city and how we interact with it. Courtesy of logistics, we no longer have to physically go anywhere to shop, conduct business or be entertained. By allowing direct delivery of goods, logistics skip-stops the existing city to establish a new relationship between production and consumption. This is in stark contrast to what was projected in the 1970s and 1980s, when “ground floor retail” was hailed as the primary ingredient of postmodern urban planning. The belief that commercial programming — shopping — would revitalize the city was the last attempt to stall de-urbanization as downtown areas were abandoned in favor of suburban living. Rather than a means to save the city, however, thanks to logistics, shopping has become the mechanism that kills it. This is already clear in the range of brick-and-mortar retailers that have closed down in recent years, from Borders (books) to Blockbusters (videos), after losing market share to online entertainment platforms such as Netflix, Inc., the DVD-rental network, and Redbox, a supplier of DVD-rental vending facilities.14 Netflix delivers DVDs through the US mail and at the time of writing offers a streaming-only plan internationally in North and South America, the Caribbean, Spain, the UK, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Ireland. Redbox allows customers to rent DVDs and games from self-service kiosks in the US and formerly Canada. Like Netflix, it is making deals with Hollywood distribution companies for access to sell DVDs as close as possible to their release dates. In addition, it won’t be long until both companies will abandon physical points of interface with the public as they work with communication companies to secure ways to fully stream movies, games and music to households, making entertainment a fully virtual service. Soon, there will be no need to go out to the movies anymore. Reading and entertainment are not the only behaviors that logistics has impacted. Courtesy of Peapod (and of course AmazonFresh), groceries, including perishables, can now be ordered online and delivered within twenty-four hours. In the case of Peapod and the British chain Tesco, virtual storefronts at train stations and airports allow shoppers to order produce by scanning barcodes with a phone for home
previous: 4.1 Amazon.com global fulfillment center map, 2014
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Amazon’s 139 fulfillment centers worldwide (as of December 2014)
delivery.15 Financial markets are now substantially managed through online trading and mathematical formulas performed by supercomputers. Trading floors are no longer the roaring circuses of the 1980s as electronic platforms (online trading exchanges) empty out the pits and render “open outcry” an obsolete language. Banks and credit depots will soon follow.16 New information technologies for businesses and cloud-space facilities are dematerializing the workplace as well. Services offered by companies from LinkedIn to Google Docs to Gotomeeting provide access to a range of programs previously considered fundamental to the office in situ. In London, many financial companies are reducing office space either by eliminating work spaces (to as little as one desk for two workers) or reducing the area desks take up, with the knowledge that employees rarely spend all day at an assigned work space and instead choose to move around the office to work in groups with colleagues — or even work from home courtesy of the cloud, resulting in higher densities and a reduction in the footprint required for an office to operate.17 And then there is Facebook, now the most populated place on earth. That on-demand urbanism can be held responsible for the emptying of the city is certainly a significant (and to many a distressing) implication of logistics, one that can be positioned alongside other terms addressing urban vacancy, from thinning (Lewis Mumford), terrain vague (Ignasi de Solà-Morales), dross (Lars Lerup), drosscape (Alan Berger), shrinking (Philipp Oswalt) and ghosted (Kazys Varnelis).18 It’s true that on-demand urbanism continues to reconfigure the city as less and less the result of a set of formal procedures, expanding the dialogue surrounding the implications of post-war technologies in the city that anticipated the complete dematerialization of physical space in favor of architecture and urbanism as a set of purely environmental effects. Yet the most cogent lesson offered by on-demand urbanism is that the city itself as a formal entity is no longer the only mechanism that delivers us those things and services that traditionally mark a kind of urban lifestyle. Logistics now competes with, if not eclipses, the city as the dominant public space of our era. Logistics’s claim as a cultural space is not the result of the time-space efficiencies so germane to its success but rather the fact that its infrastructure, devices, software and spaces (here, I refer to the wands, robots, tablets, fulfillment [ Claire Lyster ]
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centers and so on mentioned previously) fuse to permit incomparable access to an even larger notion of urbanity, one that serves the needs and augments the experiences of everyday routine. What we learn from logistics is that urbanity is no longer a destination in the habitual sense; it is recast as a multi-layered organism of exchange — a service platform.
The City as a Service Platform: Past The opportunity for architecture to rethink the city under the rubric of a service platform might behoove it to identify a context for this way of thinking. Fortunately, history has its own archive of time-space planning models, from retail to freight to food, that embrace new levels of rationality and living as well as new design concepts. The following list encompasses some of the more practical, quirky, real and speculative systems on record. MAIL-ORDER DELIVERY: Even before online purchasing and fasttrack delivery became popular, at the beginning of the twentieth century there existed a significant example of platform engineering within the retail industry. The mail-order catalog was pioneered in Chicago by two corporations, Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck, with the same entrepreneurial gusto we find in many of today’s logistical enterprises. Moreover, these corporations sold an equally large variety of goods as their contemporary counterparts, from spinning wheels to houses, through a catalog that was distributed to railroad depots and private dwellings in rural areas, where the majority of the US population was still living at the turn of the twentieth century. The companies also provided generous credit terms and low prices. Aiding the effectiveness and popularity of the industry were Rural Free Delivery and parcel post, both enacted by Congress and initiated by the Post Office in 1898 and 1913 respectively, which resulted in free or direct home delivery of goods anywhere in the nation. Rural Free Delivery brought daily letter service to isolated farms whose occupants would previously make the trek into the nearest town post office to receive mail, while parcel post allowed the direct delivery of
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items weighing more than four pounds that otherwise would be sent by private express companies. Like Jeff Bezos, Richard Sears, the founder of Sears Roebuck and a native of Minneapolis, also began life as a technologist. While Bezos began writing software for an innovative e-trading firm in New York after graduating from Princeton in 1986, Sears was a telegrapher, a skill that propelled him to the position of station manager at a railroad station in North Redwood, Minnesota. After successfully selling watches to other station agents along the line, Sears established a mail-order company and moved to Chicago in 1887. What books were to Bezos, watches were to Sears, but soon the company opened up to sell everything from sewing machines to Stradivarius violins and even food such as coffee, tea, beans and rice.19 In 1908 you could buy a whole house from a Sears mail-order catalog and have it delivered by train. (Now that’s door to door. Even Amazon, in all its phantasmagoria, is not that smart, sustainable or convenient — yet! 20 ) Each day the company received 4,000 to 6,000 orders for clothing, which it tailored on the ninth floor of a depot on Chicago’s southwest side constructed in 1906. Covering 40 acres (16 hectares) and with an interior accommodation of 3 million square feet (280,000 square meters), the state-of-the-art Sears complex was the largest commercial facility in the world at the time. The primary space in the complex was the merchandise building, a nine-story-high structure that measured 1,100 feet (335 meters) long by 355 feet (108 meters) wide. It stored most of the items available in the catalog except for very large shipments, which were sent directly from factories to customers. The plant also comprised dedicated space for mail, records and routing and departments for correspondence, stenography, card indexing and accounting (figures 4.2 and 4.3). Catalogs were produced on site, requiring areas for printing and typesetting; these included an electrotype foundry and a pressroom that could output 1,200-page catalogs complete with binding and covers. A 30,000-square-foot (2,800-square-meter) engine room kept the plant in constant operation. Employees, who typically worked a sixty-four-hour week, had access to a hospital and a library, and the company restaurant served 12,000 meals each day. 21
[ Claire Lyster ]
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Even one hundred years ago, albeit it in a much cruder and slower 4.2 form, the integration of information systems was critical to the suc- Sears Roebuck and Company mail order plant, cess of the mail-order business. The process of filling and sorting Chicago, interior view of orders at Sears was invented by Otto Doering and became known as package room, circa 1906 the “schedule system.” Incoming mailbags were weighed each morning to help anticipate the allocation of labor in all departments, as it was determined that a pound of mail yielded forty orders. Nonetheless, all orders for the day were opened and processed by 8 a.m. — 120 mail openers could open 27,000 letters each hour — so that employees on the day shift knew exactly the scope of work ahead of them. Multiple requests in a single order, known as a “mixed ticket,” might include such diverse merchandise as groceries, a plough and a suit that would all originate from different departments in the plant. Incoming orders were stamped in fifteen-minute intervals as they moved through the various departments. To avoid backup, an order moved to its next destination in the plant after a certain amount of time had passed whether itEven was ready not, and departments missed were one orhundred years ago,that albeit it deadlines in a much cruder and slower fined. A typical order comprised twenty-seven “handlings” between form, the integration of information systems was receipt and shipment. Monday was the busiest day at the plant, whencritical to the sucupwards one hundred thousand orders would be received; thisof vol-filling and sorting cess ofof the mail-order business. The process ume would increase in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Outbound orders at Sears was invented by Otto Doering and became known as goods were transported to a lower-level packing room via gravity
the “schedule system.” Incoming mailbags were weighed each morningCirculation to help anticipate the allocation of labor in all departments, as it 04 128 was determined that a pound of mail yielded forty orders. Nonetheless,
4.2 Sears Roebuck and Company mail order p Chicago, interior view package room, circa 1
chutes from storage floors above and dispatched to waiting trains, which delivered them to the post office and on to customers. 22 Suffice it to say that logistics has a long history and door-to-door delivery is not a new urban phenomenon. Like the attendant spaces of contemporary logistical organizations, both hard and soft infrastructural systems dominated the Sears plant. Spur tracks — extensions from all but two of the main railroads — facilitated immediate access to the major trunk lines, allowing for the quick receipt of inbound materials as well as the distribution of completed orders, which were previously transported by horse-drawn wagons between warehouses, express delivery carriers and the railroads. Conveyors, chutes, tubes and walkways enabled the fast flow of goods into, around and out of the plant. An internal pneumatic system for routing tickets to merchandise floors and an advanced telephone exchange for effective communication between departments enabled faster transmission of orders. Together with the schedule system, thesefloors transport and communication conduitsto allowed merchandise chutes from storage above and dispatched waiting trains, to ship the same day for a single ticket and within forty-eight hours 22 which delivered them to the post office and on to customers. Suffice for mixed tickets. 23 it to say that logistics hasthe a long history andis door-to-door delivery is In fact, mail-order industry relevant here for many reasons: not only because one would be foolish to think that door-to-door sernot a new urban phenomenon. vice began with Amazon and its kin and that logistics does not have its
4.3 Sears Roebuck and Company mail order plant, Chicago, interior view of records room, circa 1906
Roebuck and ny mail order plant, o, interior view of s room, circa 1906 [ Claire Lyster ]
Like the attendant spaces of contemporary logistical organizations, The City as Service Platform both infrastructural systems dominated the Sears plant. 129 hard and softUrbanism on Demand: The City as Service Platform Spur tracks — extensions from all but two of the main railroads — facili-
4.4 Sears catalog cover, 1897 The catalog from 1897 is 786 pages long and was divided into thirty product categories, from groceries to drugs and from agricultural implements to furniture. It was designed, typeset and printed at the Sears plant in Chicago and sent to millions of homes. The cover depicts Ceres, the goddess of corn and earth, amidst a bountiful assortment of goods overlooked by a map of the world, implying the status and range of the mailorder corporation. The first section of the catalog seen here provided instructions to customers on order procedures, shipping rates and returns. Over its 105-year history (it was produced from 1888 to 1993), the Sears catalog was often the first to offer new items unavailable elsewhere (for example, an electric washing machine in 1910 and silk stockings in 1912).
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own distinct urban history, or because like logistics, at the beginning of the twentieth century in the US, the mail-order industry presented a threat to independently run stores, especially in rural areas. More significantly, the door-to-door service facilitated by the mail-order industry was not just mere convenience or servicing consumer fetish; rather, it held a much deeper agency as mitigator of the urban/ rural divide. At the height of the industry in the first decade of the twentieth century, approximately 60 percent of the US population still remained rural. The service permitted those in farming communities access to a range of goods not available locally. Mail order was an equalizer of sorts, as it began to deny geographic isolation and bring the city to the frontier. With the mail-order catalog — the ancestor of Amazon’s web page — customers had immediate access to a wide array of goods without making a trip to the city. The 1943 Sears News Graphic wrote that the Sears catalog “serves as a mirror of our times, recording for future historians today’s desires, habits, customs, and mode of living.”24 Catalogs varied, with special issues printed in color; some contained material samples, while others were dedicated to special events, such as one titled the Christmas Wish Book (figure 4.4). Finally, Sears’s more sophisticated deployment of the railroads as the primary means of delivery immediately renders it, from an infrastructural perspective, a highly sustainable model for a delivery platform far exceeding what we have today. Some lessons are hard taught. LAYERED CITY: Freight is not a major player in the architect-planner’s repertoire, yet mechanisms for getting stuff to where it is needed have a surprisingly rich history in urban discourse. Dedicated to transportation, Chapter 5 of the 1909 Plan Of Chicago focuses on a regional– metropolitan delivery platform and includes Daniel Burnham’s proposal for a coordinated system of surface and subsurface freight distribution (figure 4.5). The largely unbuilt multi-scalar freightscape had four components: two harbors, one each on the north and south sides of the city; a huge inland freight yard with adjacent warehouses and services accessible to all; twenty-two rail trunk lines that ran through the city; and a system of underground tunnels that linked these nodes into a larger aqua–rail freightscape. The plan was part of a strategy to combat congestion, which at that time was caused by goods brought to the city in the course of transport elsewhere. With this new plan, The City as Service Platform
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merchandise redistributed in Chicago was not permitted into the city center and was sorted instead at the new mega-sized freight yard, which into Burnham described merchandise redistributed in Chicago was not permitted the city 4.5as a machine in the city. In this respect, Burnham’s plan was a prototype for typical freight patterns in the center and was sorted instead at the new mega-sized freight yard, “Plan of Chicago,” Pl. 69, mid-century city, where aChicago warehouse on Daniel the periphery near trunk rail IL, 1909. which Burnham described as a machine in the city. Insupports this respect, lines a downtown facility (a model that JIT delivery has H. retail Burnham and Edward Burnham’s plan was a prototype for typical freight the H. Bennett architects, notpatterns completelyinsuperseded). Burnham imagined that the large tunnels Transparency Co. link up with an existlinking the trunk freightrail yard to Chicago the harbors would also mid-century city, where a warehouse on the periphery near photographers ingJIT subterranean freight system called the Chicago Downtown Tunnel lines supports a downtown retail facility (a model that delivery has Network, a railway 40 feet (12 meters) below grade that connected not completely superseded). Burnham imagined that the large tunnels Image depicting a new the basements of many large retail buildings in the commercial heart freight handling system linking the freight yard to the harbors would also linkofup with an existthe city (the “Loop”) with other rail yards. Working together, for the cityfreight that integrates ing subterranean freight system called the Chicago Downtown Tunnelwouldstorage these two systems createwith a dedicated conduit for the arrival, rail and water transfer and consumptiondistribution of goods at national, regional, metropolitan Network, a railway 40 feet (12 meters) below grade that connected systems. At the time of the plan, Chicago and local scales. Goods not suitable for the tunnels (such as merchanthe basements of many large retail buildings in the commercial heart was the would fifth-largest city dise for restaurants and hotels) be distributed via trolleys on of the city (the “Loop”) with other freight rail yards. Working together, in the world. The plan is passenger rail lines between the hours of 1 a.m. and 7 a.m.; Burnham these two systems would create a dedicated conduit for the arrival, still the best example of the even suggested constructing an outer freight-subway circuit separate integration of numerous transfer and consumption of goods at national, regional, metropolitan from the passenger system specifically for goods. urban systems into a single Overall, the plan not only envisioned more efficient freight transfer and local scales. Goods not suitable for the tunnels (such as merchanvision for a city. across city and dise for restaurants and hotels) would be distributed via the trolleys onregion but, more significantly, went beyond its instrumental agency by freeing up space downtown for other pubpassenger rail lines between the hours of 1 a.m. and 7 a.m.; Burnham lic uses. Moreover, worth mentioning as an extended legacy of the
even suggested constructing an outer freight-subway circuit separate from the passenger system specifically for goods. 04 Circulation Overall, the plan not only envisioned more efficient freight transfer across the city and region but, more significantly, went beyond its instrumental agency by freeing up space downtown for other public uses. Moreover, worth mentioning as an extended legacy of the
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4.5 “Plan of Ch Chicago IL, H. Burnham H. Bennett Chicago Tra photograph
Image depi freight han for the city storage wi distribution time of the was the fift in the worl still the bes integration urban syste vision for a
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plan is Wacker Drive (1924–1926), which was route (later extended to three levels) for service cars. The lower level serves the basements of city’s business district — the tunnel network Pneumatic tubes at New 4.6 Pennsylvania plan is Wacker Drive (1924–1926), which was conceived as a bi-level York’s never used as intended — providing direct freig Pneumatic Terminal, Terminal post The route (later extended to three levels) for service vehicles and pleasure New York, circa office. 1914 cars. The without lower level serves the basements some buildings In in the disturbing the ofcity above. fact, its d canisters in the New city’s business district — the tunnel network mentioned above was Pneumatic tubes at New early introduction of layered York tubes were made of never usedan York’s Pennsylvania as intended — providing direct freight access andinfrastructure removal Terminal post office. The steel and measured 7 inches without disturbing the city above. In fact, its double-decker format canisters in the New pleasure traffic and a forerunner of isthe man tubes were made of 21 an early introduction of layered infrastructure separating freight and (18 York centimeters) and steel and measured 7 inches for New York and Paris the urban earlyplans twentieth and a forerunner of the manyin utopian inches (53 centimeters) inpleasure traffic (18 centimeters) and 21 for New York and Paris in the early twentieth century. Here, freight inchesThey (53 centimeters) was not relegated as a functional challenge bu length. carriedin mail at was not relegated as a functional challenge but channeled as a wider length. They carried mail at an average speed of 30 mph an average speed of 30 mph organizational thatofled theasway organizational device that led thedevice way for visions the city a multi-for vision kmh), and canister (48 (48 kmh), andeach each canister layered machine, i.e., as a sectional platform as opposed to a planar could hold from 400 to machine, i.e., as a sectional platform could hold The from 400was to one, as in layered previous eras. 700 letters. system 25 twenty-four one, as in previous eras. 700comprised letters.ofThe system was substations that were 4.6 Pneumatic Terminal, New York, circa 1914
25
PNEUMATIC NETWORKS: From the middle of the nineteenth cencomprised connected toof thetwenty-four main post tury, many cities including Berlin, Paris, Prague and New York installed office in NYC. substations that were 26 extensive PNEUMATIC pneumatic networks for the delivery of mail. From Londonthe had middle NETWORKS: connected to the main post over 57 miles (92 kilometers) of tubing; Paris’s extensive network, tury, many cities including Berlin, Paris, Prague office in NYC.
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extensive pneumatic networks for the Urbanism on Demand: The City as Service Platform
delivery over 57 miles (92 kilometers) of tubing; Paris
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which was used as recently as 1983, ran over 200 miles (322 kilometers) at its peak; and Berlin’s Rohrpost (1865–1976) stretched to 158 miles (254 kilometers) across twenty-seven lines. Most pneumatic systems comprised underground pipes between 2 1/2 and 3 inches (6.4 and 7.6 centimeters) in diameter that connected attendant terminals (figures 4.6 and 4.7). Messages were placed into capsules propelled by compressed air. 27 While the mail networks (known as street pipes) did not link directly to private residences, comical speculation in Modern Mechanics claimed the pneumatic system could also deliver food prepared in communal kitchens to apartment buildings within a ten-block radius. Housewives could select meals from a menu for residents in each communal kitchen zone and orders, placed by phone, would supposedly arrive in fifteen minutes (figure 4.8). Despite this fictitious report, bordering on science fiction, the article anticipates that the growing mechanization of society would no longer be confined to the factory and the metropolis but be exported to aid the organization of the domestic interior. 28 Furthermore, pneumatic tubes were not only smart but also quick: at 30 feet (9 meters) per second, a letter or small package could travel 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) in six minutes, exposing citizens to new speeds of communication that we now take for granted. In his book, Make Way for Mail, John Floherty writes of the system in New York, “As one of these projectiles may be dispatched every ten seconds, hundreds of them are continually in flight beneath the streets of the great city. Ten million letters were dispatched recently through the tubes in nearly 28,000 projectiles in one day”. 29 Still operative in banks and hospitals today, pneumatic networks are fine-tuned point-to-point local distribution systems akin to plumbing or the water supply, smart enough to negotiate multiscalar territories from an individual building to a city or region. In New York, trash is removed from Roosevelt Island via an automated vacuum collection system, while a British company called FoodTubes was set up in 2008 in the hopes of transferring food via pipeline in dense urban areas.30
Previous: 4.7 The Pneumatic Tube Room, General Post Office, London, circa 1897–1899 The earliest known pneumatic post system was in London, where in 1853 a 600-foot (183-meter) tube connected the stock exchange and the “Central Telegraph Company”.
MAIL TRAIN: Railway mail distribution in the US provides another interesting historical platform model. By the mid-1860s, it had become more efficient to sort mail on the train itself as opposed to at an office in a destination city or at branch depots en route. To avoid delays and
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4.8 “Pneumatic tubes shoot hot meals to homes,” 1935 This speculative (and comical) endeavor to deliver food through pneumatic tubes in pre-war Berlin presages Amazon.com, Peapod and other contemporary logistical systems.
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redistribution, the Postal Service developed a system whereby mail would already be sorted by the time it reached the nearest station along the line. Mail clerks were responsible for coordinating complex schedules and worked in a customized railcar designed explicitly for this purpose. Letters were sorted into bundles and tied with twine, with the top letter facing upward to indicate the stop at which the package would leave the train. The premise of the delivery system was to minimize interruptions and provide a simple way to sort mail for both through and local points along the route. The mail train (figure 4.9) is significant here as a hybrid typology combining figure (industrially designed train car) and flow (freight rail), but also because it prompts the questions: Is it an infrastructure? Is it a space? Is it an information system? Really (not unlike on-demand urbanism), it’s all three. Its specific set of accouterments in the form of hooks and cranes (mail clerks transferred outgoing and incoming mail along the route by hanging bags of mail on hooks at catchers at way stations), 31 spaces (rail depots and distribution branches), and information systems (the clerk was a logistician) worked together as a national service platform. Conveyance systems for the transportation of goods, including food, 32 also figured heavily in Roadtown, urban planner Edgar Chambless’s 1910 proposal for a linear city laid out along a train line.
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In Roadtown, housing runs along submerged railways; local stations 4.9 Interior of a railway post are located every 100 yards (91 meters) with express stations at 5-mile In Roadtown, housing runs along submerged railways; localoffice stations 4.9 car, 1905 Interior of a railway post (8-kilometer) intervals Freight and arrives by night are (figure located 4.10). every 100 yardsleaves (91 meters) with express stations at 5-mile office car, 1905 (8-kilometer) intervals (figure 4.10). Freight leaves and arrives by night on the express tracks and is handled in freight stations, while local tracks length and is handled freight stations, trains come and go on onthe theexpress same 5-mile of track in and make trips while local come and go on the same 5-mile lengthsystems of track and make trips to express stationstrains every fifteen minutes. Other network express freight stationsservice, every fifteen minutes. Other systems such as a telegraphtoservice, telephone lines andnetwork parsuch as a telegraph service, freight service, telephone lines and parcel carriers are bundled with the transportation infrastructure, while cel carriers are bundled with the transportation infrastructure, while a “telegraphe,” best described as a radio system, is wired to each a “telegraphe,” best described as a radio system, is wired to each room in the household residents to select from to a variety of a variety of roomallowing in the household allowing residents select from musical entertainment. Anentertainment. electric signalAninelectric each house notified the notified the musical signal in each house family of an oncoming train. order to train. deliver food from communal family of anInoncoming In order to deliver food from communal kitchensa to diningofrooms, a series bakeries and creameries appear kitchens to dining rooms, series bakeries and of creameries appear alongisthe city, andand foodtransported is produced and transported to serving stations along the city, and food produced to serving stations at half-mile intervals via a mechanical delivery spaced at half-milespaced intervals via a mechanical delivery system mod-system modeled on the “book railroad” at the Library of Congress in Washington, eled on the “book railroad” at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Residents order food by telephone from their individual units and DC. Residents order food by telephone from their individual units and food arrives at the dining room in two containers, one for hot food food arrives at the and dining room in two containers, one for hot food one for cold food. After the meal, dirty dishes, garbage and soiled and one for cold food. After the meal, dishes, garbage and soiled linen are returned viadirty chute to public dishwashing zones operated by linen are returned via chute public and dishwashing zones men, whiletowomen children adjourn tooperated the library by and music room. men, while womenChambless’s and childrenproposal adjourn to the library for anditsmusic room.of a domestic is significant projection environment that isfor completely reliant of onathe services transmitted Chambless’s proposal is significant its projection domestic it. Kitchen gadgets accessories eliminated in favor of a environment that istocompletely reliant and on the servicesare transmitted completely facilitated space, where the user receives to it. Kitchen gadgets and accessories are eliminated in favor of aand sends out stuff as needed. In this sense, Roadtown is a forerunner to how we completely facilitated space, where the user receives and sends out might conceive a logistical domestic environment. In contrast with stuff as needed. In this sense, Roadtown is a forerunner to how we the mid-century house of the future, which was focused inward and might conceive a logistical domestic environment. In contrast with planned around the objects and accessories that allowed domestic life the mid-century house of theinfuture, which in was focused inward and to function situ, residents such an environment outsource domesplanned around the tic objects and accessoriescase that to allowed domestic life of production chores, in Chambless’s a centralized system to function in situ, residents in suchthat an environment outsource domesand coordination today we’d call a cloud platform. All these prove we can rethink the forms of regions, tic chores, in Chambless’s caseprecedents to a centralized system of production cities and we’d neighborhoods from the perspective of a service platform, and coordination that today call a cloud platform. and notprove only under therethink rationale of forms efficiency or sustainability or as All these precedents we can the of regions, a means to handle the complexities of the urban environment and cities and neighborhoods from the perspective of a service platform, make them work for us. Rather, common to all is a vision of the city and not only under the rationale of efficiency or sustainability or as that opportunistically weaves infrastructure, technology, information a means to handle the complexities of the urban environment and make them work for us. Rather, common to all is a vision of the city 04 Circulation 136 that opportunistically weaves infrastructure, technology, information
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systems and architectural space into a single procedure multiplying access to larger organizational, economic and cultural forces that in turn, and not unlike logistics itself, prompt new ways of living.
The City as an Integrated Platform: Future At a practical level, conceiving the city less as a series of formal artifacts and more along the lines of a service platform might tackle some of the main challenges cities face today: the problems generated by increased flow, specifically material flows. After all, on-demand urbanism remains a highly unsustainable routine, as it increases activity (congestion and pollution) in urban environments that are ill-prepared to handle flow. Just think of all the bits and pieces moving around the world in a truck or a plane or a cable. A set of eight dinosaur cupcake decorations purchased for $1.49 on Amazon.com costs $8.95 to ship. They are ordered last minute for a five-year-old’s birthday and need to be shipped priority. That the plastic decorations manufactured in China ship from a warehouse in Georgia to an apartment in Chicago is not only excessive but borders on the ridiculous, and highlights the phantasmagorical inefficiencies between logistics, urbanism and post-Fordist culture. While virtual connections (cables, satellites and Wi-Fi) are a critical attribute of logistical flows and integrating them has certain consequences for architecture and planning, orchestrating the physical delivery of materials is an even more demanding task. The increase of freight flow on our highways and inner-city roads that is a direct result of on-demand culture presents its own set of challenges (or opportunities). While overnight priority shipping via air freight is an option in online retailing (the use of air cargo is skyrocketing to the point that many passenger airline carriers are now making more money transferring freight than they are moving people), in the US most orders placed online are received and delivered by ground transportation, and while logistical systems have evolved courtesy of a range of new technological and information systems, products still arrive to the customer by way of the ground, the primary physical conduit in the system. FedEx has 669 planes and about 42,000 trucks. United Parcel Service (UPS) has 92,000 trucks. The United States Post Office [ Claire Lyster ]
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(USPS) has 200,000 trucks. For many the increase in transportation is an unsustainable effect of new modes of post-Fordist exchange. It’s not surprising that UPS and FedEx are increasing their fleets of hybrid vehicles as a way to save on fuel and increase performance; they have even introduced urban cabs for use in Paris. Making matters worse are numerous offers of free shipping. Amazon Prime allows users free two-day shipping for a yearly flat rate, and the company now offers same-day delivery by special courier in major cities in the US that is driving a construction campaign of a series of large (1-million-squarefoot-plus) fulfillment centers close to highly populated urban areas.33 In tandem is the proposed expansion of AmazonFresh, for which Amazon plans to build its own fleet of trucks for ground shipping, especially in dense regions where even greater flexibility is required.34 But surely increasing and expediting transfer, especially in dense environments, only serves to exacerbate delivery problems, as it’s often easier moving goods long distances across global and national scales than local delivery, or what is commonly called “the last mile.” 35 Contemporary freight flows tend to be higher frequency and take up less space (the cupcake decorations would fit in your back pocket) and often move over longer distances (they were made in China). Despite the efficiency and intelligence of logistical systems on the front end and the technological brilliance of FedEx and UPS, when it comes to curating delivery, we rely on older systems from the industrial era to get things where they need to be. Such a “means to end” balance is out of whack, calling into question how smart (and how convenient) logistics is after all. Virtuous resistance to the complexity and contradiction of our newly acquired on-demand routine is one path to take, and this reaction is already visible as a form of activist practice urging us to think locally, especially when it comes to buying food. Drone delivery, it if ever takes off (excuse the pun), is certainly another option to address these inefficiencies; however, until either everything can be streamed to your device or you have the facility to 3-D print what you need — or 250 of capitalist hegemony suddenly disappears — additional innovative delivery networks are required. What we need are smarter modes of distribution that extend the machinic (or subversive) intelligence found in the warehouse and sort center to the design of new delivery mechanisms at the scale of cities and regions.
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_Generica
“Building approaches the zero degree of blunt expediency a chilling, thrilling, almost Darwinian opportunism in action. Design it appears, at the scale at last, is dead.�
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Transition:
Interface While looking at infrastructural systems, architecture takes a backseat. Architectural features and agency of architecture in spaces that serve logistics has been underdeveloped. Currently, the architecture of distribution centers is delivered in the form of prefabricated concrete or metal tilt-up panels. These perengineered structures can be erected quickly and with a minimal specialization of labor. The repetition of per-fabricated units arrayed in the x and y direction to satisfy any building footprint adds to the feasibility of this economic model. As stated by Lyster, in Learning From Logistics, “Architecture is prostituted, its attributes reduced to being cheap, easy, and quick”. At a first glance, logistical spaces read as infrastructural environments instead of purposefully design spaces with varying qualities. However, there are new modes of operation for design to be found in seemingly architecturally deprived logistic spaces. One of these is the detail. Many of these logistical systems at the FedEx sort center consist of an “architecture that is legible not in figure, material or form but in the tectonic details that simplify the transferal of goods from the runway – onto the conveyor belt and back to outbound planes.” This detail, discussed in Deborah Richmond’s essay, was the conversion of investment in large distribution
warehouse chains from the fronts to the backs of the buildings. This flip from the facade to the loading dock “not only shifts familiar perceptions of access and sequence but also signifies a shift from the visual and symbolic toward a celebration of process”.
“Architecture is prostituted, its attributes reduced to being cheap, easy, and quick.� -Claire Lyster
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Transition:
Loading Dock The back has always been the working side of architecture, but with the transition to the loading dock, there is no longer an opposition between front and back, and in many cases, there is no front. Now, an entire buildings perimeter is expressed as a loading interface. The detail of this continuous rear is extremely significant, as there is no longer an interruption in the movement of goods. As is the case of the FedEx sorting centers, the entire delivery system permits continuous flow through exchange points, dissolving boundaries between transport unloading, receiver points, and sorting and distribution. Docks and doors that receive delivery constitute spatial features that render architecture less as space and more as a product of function in which the form of this interface links many facets of a larger supply chain. In “behaving as a receiving and transmitting interface, architecture anticipates stimuli beyond itself as spaces burst open their boundaries to accept, channel, direct, and corral a web of relationships between interconnected bits in spaces� . The detail, as defined above, now moves away from figural qualities of space and instead towards the relationships between parts that accommodate the flows that pass through it. Architecture is now a mechanism for curating flows that exist beyond its physical limits.
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Transition:
Ground The ground, not building shell, is now the most important feature of contemporary distribution centers. This can be seen by the sheer size in footprint that some of these logistical spaces absorb. Structures so large the interior cannot be air-conditioned. This comes as no surprise that large footprints are the key to the functionality of logistics space, for everything wants to be accessible and close to the ground. The ground is the first built surface of the site and remains a base from which the rest of the interior is fabricated. Whether it is the logistics of people, information, or goods, this requires large spaces that exceed the scale typically associated with architecture. These series of ground conditions (runway, warehouse floor, conveyor belt) no longer exist as discrete units but operate together as a large integrated ecology. Outside and inside merge through tasks taking place in a continuous sequence.
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Chicago Loop
Highland Park Ford Plant Willow Run, Ypsilanti, Michigan 8 acres
Amazon Fulfillment Center Schertz, Texas 29 acres
Target Distribution Center Lacey, Washington St. 44 acres
Fedex Memphis World Hub Memphis International Airport, Tennessee 61 acres
UPS Worldport Louisville International Airport, Kentucky 99 acres
Tesla Gigafactory Electric Ave, Sparks, Nevada 247 acres
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Birth of Uncertain Space This article focuses on American architect Albert Kahn’s Five-Year Plant which represents a new architect model. Kahn’s partnership with Ford Motor’s automaker was to produce mass-production facilities. The emergence of the Five-Year Plant during wartime efforts inevitably created uncertain space. This efficient and flexible space was the outcome of rapid construction methods where everything could not be completely designed before it was constructed.
1. Ralph Patterson, “Five Year Plant,” 1944. In Louis Kahn, “Don’t Let War Plants Scare You,” Nation’s Business 32 (1944): 28.
2. Ralph Patterson, “Don’t Let War Plants Scare You,” 1944. In Louis Kahn, “Don’t Let War Plants Scare You,” Nation’s Business 32 (1944): 27.
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The End of the Supply Chain? Consumers Gone Wild : Distribution [ Deborah Richmond ]
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Is there any hope in this relentless world of shuttling things? Under the continuous calculus of capital, the global distribution of wealth has not kept pace with efficiency of the global distribution of goods. As agglomeration strategies break down under pressures to diversify dependence on specific ports and to fragment warehousing, perhaps a similar breakdown in capital expenditures in the global shipping complex will enable small and medium-sized entrepreneurs to participate more directly in the requisition of labor and goods overseas at a smaller, more manageable scale. Until it does, containerization will remain the sinister embodiment of oppressive retail practices to depress prices and of a culture of “consumers gone wild�. -Deborah Richmond
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Connected Commerce
Imagine this scenario: In the San Francisco Bay area one weekday morning in the near future, a longhaul trucker wakes up and gets ready for the day’s shift. She’s made incredible time recently, covering two to three times the distance she used to be able to cover in the same time span. As she pours her coffee and settles in at the control center, she reminisces about when she had to physically be in the truck to drive it. Now, it’s cruising down the highway a thousand miles away, along with three others on different routes that she’s responsible for. She watches her monitors as streams of data come in on location, fuel consumption, the state of the transported goods and local weather. She’s ready to take control of one of the rigs if a situation arises or for the last mile, when she’ll carefully guide the vehicle in the loading dock by remote control. No longer just a pipe dream of logistics managers and futurists, remote-controlled, connected and autonomous trucks are now in development. Among the companies developing the technology behind them is Starsky Robotics, based in San Francisco. The company’s chief executive officer, Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, believes autonomous trucking could benefit much more than just the trucking industry. “This, single-handedly, could [power most] U.S. economic growth for a year or two,” he says. Along with other innovations like tech-enabled factories and connected retail that blends the digital and physical worlds, autonomous trucking is changing the way businesses produce, distribute and sell goods. Empowered by new technologies that seamlessly provide business leaders with the right data at the right time, these new advances can allow companies to keep up with shifting customer expectations and capitalize on new opportunities.
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Design Research ALAR 8100 Professor : Matthew Jull Advisor : Luis Pancorbo Student : Tyler Mauri
Works Cited _Corner, James, “The Landscape Urbanism Reader,” ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) 21-33. _Carr, Austin. “The Future of Retail In The Age of Amazon” Fast Company Magazine, no. December 2017/Januaray 2018 (November 24, 2017). _“Connected Commerce: How Connectivity Is Driving the Future of Commerce.” The Washington Post WP BrandStudio (n.d.). _Deborah, Richmond, “Consumers Gone Wild: Distribution,” in The Infrastructural City, ed. Kazys Varnelis (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2009). 208-217 _Dripps, Robin, “Groundwork,” in Site Matters: Design Concepts, Histories, and Strategies, ed. Carol J. Burns and Andrea Kahn (London: Routledge, 2004), 72. _Lyster, Claire. Learning From Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities. Reviews: Books. Basel, Berlin: Birkhauser, 2016. _Morris, Roderick Conway. “If a City Were Perfect, What Would It Look Like?” The New York Times. May 07, 2012. Accessed November 7th, 2017. http://www.nytimes.com Koolhaas, Rem. CONTENT. TASCHEN, 2004. ———. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping. Taschen, 2001. ———. MUTATIONS, Harvard Project on the City. Actar Publishers, n.d. _Pamphlet Architecture 30 Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism _“The Coldscape,” in “Logistics,” CABINET 47 (2012) _Marc Angelil and Cary Siress, “Discounting Territory: Logistics as Capital Principle of Spatial Practices, “Scales of the Earth,” New Geographies 4 (2011): 33-34. _Lauder, Adam. “Albert Kahn’s Five-Year Plant and the Birth of ‘Uncertain Space.’” Future Anterior Winter 2015, Volume 12, no. 2 (n.d.): 39–61.