Exteriorless Architecture: Form, Space, and Urbanities of Neoliberalism (Routledge Research in Architecture) [1 ed.] 1032170816, 9781032170817

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EXTERIORLESS Architecture

The current phase of capitalist development manifests itself through a very diverse range of spatial byproducts: data centers, warehouses, container terminals, logistics parks, and many others. Generally considered as mediocre and banal examples that sit outside of pre-established disciplinary canons, these architectural episodes are extremely relevant. They are relevant not for their aesthetic or historic qualities but for what they represent – for the system of values these spaces embed. They express specific power relations, exacerbate issues of labor, and generate dramatic processes of subjectivity. Most importantly, these architectures, despite their formal and typological heterogeneity, belong to a common paradigm: the EXTERIORLESS. How can an architecture of the EXTERIORLESS be defined? How does it differentiate from examples and manifestations of the past? How do notions of legibility, form versus function, and typological articulation come into play? In situating the spatialities of contemporary capitalism within the larger debate on Anthropocene, Post-Anthropocene, and Capitalocene, the book attempts to answer those questions by delineating three main characteristics for an architecture of the EXTERIORLESS: its physical and symbolic role as interface; its ambiguous condition of being at the same time local and global, isolated and connected, compressed and expanded; and, lastly, its contribution to new forms of urbanity in absence of the traditional city. These three defining aspects constitute the main sections of the book. Each section includes two chapters covering a wide spectrum of themes and examples. In its tripartite organization, the book describes the influence that the experimental architecture of the 1960s has exerted on late-capitalist spatial byproducts; it analyzes the impact of logistics on the redesign of the territory; and it introduces the radical processes of urban transformation generated by the EXTERIORLESS. Stefano Corbo is an Italian architect and educator. He holds a Ph.D in Advanced Architectural Design from UPM-ETSAM Madrid. Over the last years, he taught at several academic institutions in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and China. In 2022, Corbo joined the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft.

Routledge Research in Architecture

The Routledge Research in Architecture series provides the reader with the latest scholarship in the field of architecture. The series publishes research from across the globe and covers areas as diverse as architectural history and theory, technology, digital architecture, structures, materials, details, design, monographs of architects, interior design, and much more. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality architectural research. Architecture of Threshold Spaces A Critique of the Ideologies of Hyperconnectivity and Segregation in the Socio-Political Context Laurence Kimmel Pyrotechnic Cities Architecture, Fire-Safety and Standardisation Liam Ross Architecture and the Housing Question Edited by Can Bilsel and Juliana Maxim Architecture and the Housing Question Edited by Can Bilsel and Juliana Maxim Mies at Home From Am Karlsbad to the Tugendhat House Xiangnan Xiong The Philadelphia School and the Future of Architecture John Lobell For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Architecture/book-series/RRARCH

EXTERIORLESS Architecture Form, Space, and Urbanities of Neoliberalism Stefano Corbo

Designed cover image: Life and Death in the EXTERIORLESS, 2022. Courtesy: © Stefano Corbo First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Stefano Corbo The right of Stefano Corbo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Corbo, Stefano, author. Title: Exteriorless Architecture: Form, Space, and Urbanities of Neoliberalism Description: Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge research in architecture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022035550 (print) | LCCN 2022035551 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032170817 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032170824 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003251736 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture and society. | Architecture–Political aspects. | Neoliberalism. Classification: LCC NA2543.S6 C667 2023 (print) | LCC NA2543. S6 (ebook) | DDC 720.1/03–dc23/eng/20220902 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035550 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035551 ISBN: 978-1-032-17081-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-17082-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-25173-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003251736 Typeset in Sabon LT Std by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

For Nadia and Nuccio

Contents

List of Illustrationsviii Acknowledgmentsix Prefacexi 1 Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 2 Interface

1 21

Genesis or Prefiguration 29 Liberating the Exterior 40 3 Expanded Domains

51

The Empire of Logistics 57 The Cloud is Material 72 4 Forms of Urbanity

81

(Extra)State and Space 88 The Privatized City 97 5 Afterword

103

Index

109

List of Illustrations

A

Stefano Corbo, Life and Death in the EXTERIORLESS I, 2022.x 1.1 Stefano Corbo, Life and Death in the EXTERIORLESS II, 2022.1 2.1 Cedric Price, Vehicles Equipped for Auto Link and Rapid Transit Servicing (Atom Project), 1967. 27 2.2 Michael Webb, The Cushicle, 1966. 28 2.3 OMA, Euralille, Lille, 1989–1994. 39 2.4 Foster and Partners, Apple Park, Cupertino, 2017. 39 3.1 Umm Qasr, Basra, Iraq. 56 3.2 Niccolò Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra (The Art of War), 1519-1520.56 3.3 Stefano Corbo, The Empire of Logistics.60 3.4 Global Marine Traffic, Accessed May 25, 2022. 60 3.5 APM Terminal, Prinses Amaliahaven, 2019. 61 3.6 Amazon España, Logistics Center, San Fernando de Henares.61 3.7 ANNEX, Entanglement, Irish Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021.70 3.8 Stefano Corbo, Life and Death in the EXTERIORLESS III, 2022.71 4.1 Jack Rivolta, Poster for the City of New York Department of Docks, Showing Five Ocean Liners, 1937.87 4.2 Container Terminal, Singapore, 2017. 87 4.3 CTPark Bor, Czech Republic. 88 4.4 Amazon Headquarters, Seattle. 96 5.1 Stefano Corbo, Life and Death in the EXTERIORLESS IV, 2022.103

Acknowledgments

Similar to the scattered nature of the architectures described in the book, this project has been conceived, written, and finalized in different locations across the world: Boston, Copenhagen, and Rotterdam. The EXTERIORLESS project originated unconsciously from a series of speculative drawings on the architectures of neoliberalism which then evolved into a broader investigation carried on by other means – mainly writing. Nevertheless, some of the images present in the book and the following text constitute two different aspects of the same process – the attempt to unravel the complex relationship between space and capitalist development. This book wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), my home for 5 years, which granted me a sabbatical leave in 2021 to focus on initial research explorations. Special thanks go to another institution, the Royal Danish Academy (KADK) in Copenhagen, Denmark, and in particular to the Institute of Architecture and Culture, which hosted me as a visiting scholar during the Fall semester of 2021. I’m especially grateful to Arne Høi for his warm welcome. The book has benefited enormously from the conversations held with friends and colleagues who provided reflection on my work. The Network for History and Cultural Studies at the Royal Danish Academy invited me to present for the first time the EXTERIORLESS project in its embryonal phase. Thanks are due to Martin Søberg and Nuno Grancho for helping me shape, with their advice, the structure of my work. The research process behind the book has also consisted in a series of site visits to the spaces of the EXTERIORLESS. In this respect, I’m indebted to Mark Kjeldstrøm and Sten Jensen at the DigiPlex Data Center in Copenhagen for having patiently guided me through their facilities. The genesis and development of this book overlapped with other personal endeavors on the general theme of infrastructure design. In this case too, conversations with colleagues have been of great help in revising parts of my publishing project. Thanks to Joseph Heathcott for his acute suggestions. Finally, thanks to the Routledge staff who have accompanied me in this journey over the past months: Krystal Racaniello first, and then Caroline Church and Varun Gopal.

Figure A Stefano Corbo, Life and Death in the EXTERIORLESS I, 2022. Courtesy: © Stefano Corbo

Preface

Pick, pack, S.L.A.M.1, ship, deliver. Pick, pack, S.L.A.M., ship, deliver. Pick, pack, S.L.A.M., ship, deliver. The compulsive repetition of these actions doesn’t indicate any military operation, nor does it describe the tasks performed by some robotic device. Pick, pack, S.L.A.M., ship, deliver illustrates life and labor in one of the many Amazon warehouses recently built all over the world. Such actions have become rituals of the twenty-first century’s capitalism, which manifests itself through a series of different spaces – not only warehouses – engineered to guarantee the smoothness of global production, distribution, and consumption. Oftentimes, the sequential complexity of these phases is contradicted by the banality of the buildings where those actions are performed: simple and conventional parallelepiped structures, typically integrated with a large parking area and located near strategic communication axes. 2 While warehouses have become a spatial and symbolic archetype – a facet of the circulation of capital3 – their case is not isolated. In The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval argue that capitalism evolves through a multiplicity of different forms.4 Today, in additions to warehouses, these forms are data centers, seed banks, logistics hubs, port areas, container terminals, and many others. These spaces emerged gradually, out of sight, ‘in territories where we are not allowed to wander. They occur at scales where the disciplinary language of architecture breaks down, where interiors are so vast that they become microclimates, where landscapes are so engineered that they become circuit boards.’5 Often treated as banal examples that sit outside of pre-established and recognized disciplinary canons, these artifacts are becoming the defining cultural constructions of our age. One may say, to follow Liam Young, that server farms, telecommunications networks, distribution warehouses, and so on, define the very nature of who we are today.6 The spatial byproducts of the current phase in capitalist development are therefore extremely relevant. They are relevant not for their aesthetic or historic qualities, but for what they represent – for the implicit system of values they embed. They express, first of all, the presence of specific power relations, labor issues, and infrastructural hierarchies that are worth

xii  Preface exploring. If industrial exploitation was based on bodies, muscles, and arms, the rise of post-Fordist modes of production takes the mind, language, and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value.7 We may also say that a good number of these spatial byproducts are not even occupied by people. Humans are replaced by processors and hard drives, logistics bots and mobile shelving units, autonomous cranes and container ships, robot vacuum cleaners and connected toasters, driverless tractors and taxis.8 In these new landscapes, humans are foreigners: ‘machines are making the world and we are on the outside peering in.’9 Most importantly, these architectures, despite their formal and typological diversity, share a common ground. In their heterogeneity, they depict an extended and pervasive paradigm: the EXTERIORLESS. This book aims to investigate such a condition as the product of an intricate entanglement between architecture, capitalism, and new forms of subjectivity. Illustrating the current state in capitalist development first, detecting the forms of subjectivation it produces, and analyzing its spatializations are the main research questions of the book. Yet, the complex apparatus of spatialities defining the EXTERIORLESS can only be comprehended within a larger framework. What is often considered the inevitable milieu of contemporary activities and spaces – the so-called Anthropocene – is in reality a much more complex tangle to unravel. Many have been the attempts to describe, in fact, the erosive action of human operations as well as the progressive exploitation of natural resources, not to mention the radical changes that occurred to the atmosphere, the oceans, and the Earth. But equally numerous have been the attempts to overcome the inflated use of the term Anthropocene to replace it with new interpretations. As widely known, this term originated as a geological concept in the nineteenth century, when scientists began to variously describe the extent of human influence on Earth: if George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature was one of the first works to focus on anthropogenic global change, the Italian Antonio Stoppani introduced the term Anthropozoic to describe something similar. Nevertheless, it is only at the dawn of the twenty-first century that the term acquired global relevance – in 2002, the Nobel Prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen referred to the concept of the Anthropocene for the first time after years. From a strictly disciplinary point of view, should the Anthropocene be formalized and fully recognized as a geological epoch? As pointed out by Jan Zalasiewicz and others, ‘such changes are not carried out lightly, and require wide discussion, consensus, and agreement, under the aegis of the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences.’10 Initially, earlier versions of the Anthropocene were not taken seriously because of the brief duration of human civilization – from a geological perspective – and partially because the effects of human modification of Earth’s surface were considered by geoscientists as small by comparison with those

Preface xiii deriving from natural processes. Yet, after years of controversy and debate, the word Anthropocene has progressively started to be employed also in scientific literature, as ‘this reflects a widespread realization among Earth and environmental scientists that some types of anthropogenic changes may now be compared with those of the great forces of Nature.’11 Despite its wide reception in fields other than geology, the term Anthropocene is often subject to question because of its appropriateness when describing the interpenetration between politics, economics, and the built environment. Some authors, such as Jason W. Moore, for example, have highlighted that ‘the principal driver of modern environmental change is not anthropogenic, but capitalogenic (made by capital),’12 by suggesting to use the word Capitalocene, rather than Anthropocene, to indicate the age of planetary crisis and the engine of extractive and exploitation politics, whose origin lies in older colonial practices of ‘earth-moving (mining, farming), state-making, mechanization, and symbolic praxis.’13 Jason W. Moore, in particular, insists that ‘the Capitalocene signifies capitalism as a way of organizing nature – as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology.’14 For Moore, the Capitalocene argument says at least three things that the Anthropocene does not. First of all, it insists that capitalism is not purely an economic or social system, but is a complex relation of nature, power, and capital as a whole. Second, the history of capitalism cannot start from the ‘burning of fossil fuels, in England or anywhere else.’15 Third, the Capitalocene argument questions the ‘Eurocentric – and frankly false – view of capitalism as emerging in England during the eighteenth century.’16 In treating humanity as an undifferentiated and generic whole, and ignoring the driving forces behind exploitation and erosion, the Anthropocene depicts for Moore an easy story because it doesn’t question the relations of power and production that have triggered certain phenomena; the Anthropocene ‘removes inequality, commodification, imperialism, patriarchy, and much more from the problem of humanity-in-nature.’17 Moore is not alone in his dissatisfaction with the word Anthropocene. Other authors have tried to outline an alternative theory on its origins and features. Elmar Altvater shares with Moore the idea that capitalism is more than just a social formation: ‘capitalism changed human existence; it has interpenetrated both earth systems and the mental worlds of each (social) individual.’18 Also, Altvater admits that in the Capitalocene, ‘nature has been transformed into a capital asset. Nature has been reduced to something that can be valued, traded, and used up just like any other asset: industrial capital, human capital, knowledge capital, financial claims, and so forth. This is the ideological way of incorporating nature into capitalist rationality and its monetary calculus.’19 What differs from Moore’s contribution or integrates it is Altvater’s focus on geo-engineering. Geo-engineering is for him the last stage of capitalist modernity, as it responds to a double task: on the one hand, geo-­engineering

xiv  Preface must ‘create necessary resources on the input side of the planetary social and geological systems at a time when they can no longer be easily extracted from external nature. On the other hand, it must organize new methods of dumping all emissions into the Earth’s systems. It is a seemingly impossible task.’20 Geo-engineering therefore attempts to control entire earth systems in order to preserve the equilibrium of capitalism. While geo-engineering can be read as a specific feature of the Capitalocene, Necrocene is the word employed by Justin McBrien to indicate the action of capitalism in necrotizing the entire planet, as ‘accumulation is not only productive; it is necrotic, unfolding a slow violence, occupying and producing overlapping historical, biological, and geological temporalities.’21 The Necrocene fundamentally regards the history of capitalism’s expansion as a process of extinction. 22 This is because the Anthropocene misunderstands the ecological crisis by targeting the human being as a species rather than as a capital. Apart from the dispute around the term Anthropocene, new interpretations on the current state of capitalism emerge periodically: from the so-called ‘finance capitalism,’ whose spatial translation, as pointed out by Matthew Soules, 23 comprises massive operations of real estate taking place especially in the United States and in South Asia, to the most recent debate on ‘surveillance capitalism,’ which refers to the influence of corporations such as Google and Facebook in relation to data, privacy, and surveillance. 24 This book doesn’t have any encyclopedic pretension to report all these possible interpretations, nor to examine models and schemes that belong to the territory of political economy. The focus of the book is to untangle the relationship between capitalist production, architecture, and subjectivity by adopting one specific perspective: the unstable dialectic between capitalism and the word ‘liberalism.’ As pointed out by Keller Easterling, ‘surveying a number of incarnations of liberal thought – from classical liberalism to new liberalism, New Deal liberalism, and neoliberalism – is perhaps sufficient to expose the volatility inherent in the term. Arguing that instability and paradox are built into the tradition, the historian Jerrold Seigel suggests that liberal politics vacillates between exalting the state and defending against it, while simultaneously alternating between idealized and demonized visions of society and human nature.’25 Despite the variety of interpretations at our disposal, this book will specifically work at the intersection of two specific phenomena: neoliberalism and globalization. The entanglement of these two terms will serve as a general background for the analysis of the EXTERIORLESS. Even if acknowledging that the term ‘neoliberalism’ is vague and often abused, here it is employed to describe the context of post-1980 capitalism and its ties with the rise of globalization, whose EXTERIORLESS condition is one of its most visible manifestations. Neoliberal spaces are what Martin Coward calls critical infrastructures, divided into ‘those spaces that underpin information and communication networks; those that both ensure mobility and

Preface xv perform logistical functions; and those that generate, store, and deliver power, as well as remove waste (i.e., those systems that circulate energy and its byproducts).’26 Within the context described by Coward, most of the spaces of the EXTERIORLESS belong to what is commonly described as the architecture of logistics, where logistics ‘reduces architecture to either an episodic manifestation or an impotent background, irreducible to any traditional definition of place and beyond the easy ideology of publicness. Thus, besides offering a privileged instrument to understand the tendencies and forces at work within contemporary production, the architecture of logistics compels us to update the categories through which we read politics and the city, the role of the architect, and the discipline of architecture.’27 By reflecting on the current state of capitalist development, we will be able to describe not only its spatial characterizations but also the processes of subjectivation that it generates or represses. The EXTERIORLESS deploys new subject-object relationships, where labor conditions are altered, deconstructed, and redesigned via the introduction of new technologies of performance and surveillance. In some cases, human and non-­ human agents begin to coexist in the spatialities of the EXTERIORLESS and to share similar tasks. Robotic pickers, for instance, have invaded most of Amazon’s warehouses: ‘inside the one-million-square-foot hall (92,000 square meters), the squat orange robots, roughly the size and shape of ottomans, buzzed around within a large caged area to bring workers the stacks of shelving racks from which they assembled shoppers’ orders. The robots were made by a Boston-area company called Kiva Systems, which Amazon had bought in 2012 for $775 million, thus preventing its rivals from using the technology. Robots brought the racks; humans took items from them.’28 In this respect, automation becomes a sort of battleground to test the tense struggle between human labor and machines. Supposedly, robots were introduced to improve efficiency and spare workers from exhausting tasks – ‘before the Kivas, fulfillment pickers were expected to reach speeds of about 100 items per hour. With the Kivas bringing the pods to them, the pickers were expected to reach speeds of 300 to 400 items per hour.’29 In reality, we will see how automation is most of all a tool of capitalist propaganda as its implementation in workplaces has not supplanted human labor but has just exacerbated pressure and performativity among the workers. Nevertheless, human labor, despite the celebratory proclamations on technological advancement, still plays a crucial role in the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS as well as in their potential vulnerability – see recent news from Trieste, Italy, 2021, where a dockworkers’ strike provoked disruptions and delays in the entire logistics chain of Continental Europe ­during Christmas time. Intrinsic to any discourse around subjectivity is the analysis of biopolitical devices. The architectures of landscaped, connective spaces, ‘designed to facilitate communicative, networked, cooperative behaviors and dispositions, proclaim themselves to be aligned with a progressive reality. In order

xvi  Preface to sustain this deception, the image of labor as strife, struggle, or hardship has to be absolutely negated, eradicated through elegant design and phantasmagoric appearance.’30 This book will not only regard biopolitics in a negative connotation – in terms of surveillance, control, or punishment –, but it will also try to unveil the possibility for positive forms of biopolitics that trigger class awareness and civic participation, as envisioned by philosophers such as Toni Negri or Roberto Esposito. The intricate relationship between capitalist production, space, and labor defines the general framework in which to inscribe the EXTERIORLESS. From a disciplinary standpoint, the book will address a series of questions that have to do not only with how these architectures appear and how they perform but also with their impact on broader ecosystems. How can therefore an architecture of the EXTERIORLESS be defined? How does it differentiate from examples and manifestations of the past? How do notions of legibility, form versus function, and typological articulation come into play? The book attempts to answer these questions by delineating three main characteristics for an architecture of the EXTERIORLESS: first, its physical and symbolic role as interface – infrastructure spaces that supposedly act as neutral platforms enhancing communication and transmission; second, its manifestation as expanded domains – an ambiguous condition of being at the same time isolated and connected, compressed and spread out, local and global (global because these spaces are part of transnational networks and local because they only exist in relation to specific market demands proceeding from the context they are located in – the so-called just-in-time logic); and lastly, its ability to produce new forms of urbanity, by molding, deforming, and altering city dynamics. These three defining aspects constitute the main sections of the book. INTERFACE: The first characteristic defining the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS is its materialization as interface – platforms that privilege horizontal organization over vertical expression, whose image is predominantly generic. While formally neutral, the platforms of the EXTERIORLESS are ideologically charged in the way they serve or obey specific purposes. They identify with neoliberalism, although their origin can be dated back to the utopian megastructures of 1960s’ experimental architecture and systems of sociotechnical governance. More generally, in fact, it is the decade of the 1960s that prepared the ground for the rise of late-capitalism’s spatial byproducts: ‘the promotion of cybernetics, the critique of planning, the affirmations of participation, sensory experience, connectivity and interaction, the denunciations of separation, distance, interpretation and critical reflection, the championing of the enterprising and creative individual, already mirror the ideals of neoliberalism and the model of the new subjectivity it would like to produce – performative, creative, entrepreneurial.’31 The book aims to unfold this hypothesis by taking into examination two critical moments for the formation of the EXTERIORLESS. The first moment has to do with the series of

Preface xvii visionary proposals developed around the 1960s and 1970s by groups such as Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, and other designers such as Cedric Price and Constant. In their heterogeneity, those projects outlined a variegated panorama, characterized by analogies as well as by profound differences, especially in relation to the social and political role of architecture. Speculative architectural design produced projects such as Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969), but also Constant’s New Babylon (1959– 1974), or Archizoom’s No-Stop City (1969). Initially labeled as naïve, spontaneous, and provocative proposals, only a few could imagine that after more than 50 years, the work of these designers would have progressively been depurated from its original vehemence to be absorbed into conventional disciplinary boundaries. Also, very few could imagine that those visions and predictions about the future of architecture would have turned very slowly into reality, appearing today in some of the most significant and spooky examples of the EXTERIORLESS. See Foxconn, the largest private employer in China, whose factories assemble much of the digital electronics equipment used all around the world. More than 300,000 employees live and work in a megastructural complex located in the city-factory of Zhengzhou, where the division between labor and personal life is completely denied. This Foxconn city is an island, or the materialization of Archizoom’s No-Stop City: ‘a radical level of representation of the contemporary city as an apparently hyper-expressive reality that is, actually, substantially catatonic because it is the result of infinite repetition of an alienating political system without destiny.’32 The second critical moment for the emergence of the EXTERIORLESS dates back to the end of 1980s. It takes inspiration from the term Bigness, as coined by Rem Koolhaas, and describes a shift in intention and architectural manifestations that will also occupy part of the 1990s production. The progressive dismantlement of public control in the making of the city, partially deriving by the rise of neoliberal policies, produced a self-confinement of architecture within its own physical boundaries. Architecture abandons any engagement with the city to itself become the city. Bigness announces therefore a double separation: between city and architecture – architecture now replaces the city because it doesn’t need the city –, and between interiors and exteriors – the envelope is liberated by its architectural content and becomes an autonomous territory of communication and propaganda. In discussing the impact of Koolhaas’ concept in the architectural discourse, the EXTERIORLESS will be analyzed as a paradigmatic expression of the interior-exterior dichotomy: the exterior turns itself into an expanded medium of interiority. EXPANDED DOMAINS: The second characteristic defining the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS has to do with its ambivalence. At first sight, its spaces are isolated, often located in suburban or rural areas, irresponsive to any external input. In some cases, they are even inaccessible, invisible, and hidden. Nevertheless, in spite of the apparent finitude

xviii  Preface of their shapes, the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS act as expanded domains, whose extension and influence reach beyond their physical boundaries. In this respect, logistics – that is its spatial byproducts – represents the epitome of this condition in being at the same time local and global, punctual and ramified. Originally intended as a form of knowledge proceeding from the military field, logistics applied not only to the transportation of goods during military expeditions but also to the arrangement of troops and army. Even if one can trace the major innovations in logistics as a military discipline back to the seventeenth century, it is only in the second half of the twentieth century that significant advancements have been made in the field. Progressively, some of the experience accumulated in warfare has poured into the civilian world. Nowadays, the logistics sector grows systematically worldwide, based on low-tech industry and racialized labor force.33 As described by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese, ‘according to World Bank figures, the number of twenty-foot equivalent units (measured as shipping containers) entering the world’s ports grew from 224.8 million in 2000 to 752.7 million in 2017, while freight carried by airlines around the world increased from 118.3 million ton-kilometers to 213.6 million over that period. The World Bank figures for rail movement are incomplete, but these rose from 2.3 million ton-kilometers in 2000 to 5.8 million in 2007. And this was before the shift of the center of world economic activity eastward and the escalating density of rail traffic in Asia and China’s 10,000-mile-long Silk Road freight railway from China to Europe, all part of China’s One Belt, One Road development initiative.’34 One may say that the definitive rise of logistics is directly connected to neoliberal trade policies and to globalization: ‘because its aim is to improve efficiency, lower costs, increase profit, and so on, those involved in logistical practices may see things like national borders, labor laws, and certain trade policies as obstacles to their ambitions.’35 Logistics produces sovereign territorialities and autonomous zones that undermine consolidated conceptions on states and nations. The architecture of logistics allows for the functioning and reproducibility of such zones. Architecture itself, as a discipline, is intrinsically logistic. Not by chance, the first Western treatise on architecture, Vitruvius’s De Architectura, was written by a soldier for Julius Caesar. As Francesco Marullo comments, ‘the logistic nature of architecture is explicit in the last book of Vitruvius’s treatise, which deals with mechanical apparatuses, military devices, and stratagems – or what he termed machinatio. Vitruvius considered architecture a discipline on the verge between speculation and fabrication, the application of materials and the rational understanding of their properties, a combination of practical knowledge and cunning intuition.’36 This section of the book investigates the expanded domains that shape and influence our world through logistics, by focusing attention on spaces such as container terminals, warehouses, fulfillment centers, and port

Preface xix areas. The Global Container Terminals in Bayonne, New Jersey, for example, consist of 67 hectares of semi-automated cargo-processing space. The Terminals ‘constitute a kind of peripheral commons, a shared, privately funded backstage for the realization and maintenance of the contemporary city. They are the fringe that enables the center, places where imports are scanned and stacked, where products subscriptions are fulfilled, and where other, often overlooked mundane services are performed for the benefit of a preoccupied citizenry.’37 Other cases of global ports confronting similar issues, both in Europe and in the Middle East, will be treated in the book. Rotterdam, for example, is one of the major European ports taking the lead in the digitalization and automation of its operations. The port is located 50 km away from the city center: some of its areas are partially accessible, and tours are arranged. One of the attractions is the APM Terminals Maasvlakte II, which is announced as the world’s most advanced fully automated terminal thanks to the use of remotely controlled gantry cranes. Less automated but certainly far more extended is Walmart’s ramified network, which doesn’t include only stores but also other facilities. Its three constitutive elements are supercenters, data centers, and distribution centers. These spaces have specific features, despite the common formal indifference that characterizes their envelope, and have been progressively fueling the company’s expansion. If we only consider the total area of Walmart’s retail locations in the United States, it would sum up to more than 848 million square feet, or about 19,500 acres (7,890 ha) – Manhattan, by comparison, encompasses 14,694 acres (5,945 ha).38 Walmart’s model has been recently disrupted by Amazon, which can be today defined as one of the largest logistics companies in the world. Besides warehousing, distribution, and fulfillment, Amazon also manages delivery by shaping a wide network of connections between its facilities and the urban spaces where it operates.39 Some authors have called this phenomenon platform urbanism, a form of territorial organization deriving from the collision of emergent trends in labor organization and conflicts, urban planning, and logistical capitalism.40 As the expanded domains represented by Amazon and Walmart prove, the EXTERIORLESS can be found not only in port areas or warehouses but also in spaces that have to do with invisible materials: information. At the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, the Irish Pavilion hosted an exhibition titled Entanglement. Hanging from a metal structure were cables, screens, speakers, cameras, fans, and lights. Curated by ANNEX, a multidisciplinary research and design collective, Entanglement examined not only Ireland’s place in the evolution of data infrastructure but also their impact on everyday life. While data, in fact, are by definition invisible, their production and consumption are dramatically concrete, altering the physical landscape as well as determining new urban dynamics. In raising awareness about the material footprint of the global internet and cloud services, Entanglement described the proliferation of new spaces where information

xx  Preface is stored: the data centers. Data centers will be explored in their formal expression as well as for their functioning and meaning – as paradoxical manifestations of the tension between private and public interests. FORMS OF URBANITY: The last section of the book will focus on the urban consequences of the EXTERIORLESS – its pervasive ability to reshape and irremediably alter urban environments as well as to create new ones. In other words, the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS produces new forms of urbanity, in replacement of a traditional conception of the city. The context in which such modifications emerge is what Saskia Sassen has called the global city, a space that is ‘both place-centered in that it is embedded in particular and strategic locations; and it is trans-­ territorial because it connects sites that are not geographically proximate yet are intensely connected to each other. If we consider that global cities concentrate both the leading sectors of global capital and a growing share of disadvantaged populations (immigrants, many of the disadvantaged women, people of color generally, and, in the megacities of developing countries, masses of shanty dwellers), then we can see that cities have become a strategic terrain for a whole series of conflicts and contradictions.’41 The global city is synonymous with mobility, density, congestion, and instability, to which correspond new modes of representation, and new forms of discussion and conceptualization. The EXTERIORLESS’ forms of urbanity are multiple and span different continents. We will start, once again, with Walmart and its aggressive strategies of territorial expansion. Exemplificative is what happened in Vermont where, for several years, Walmart tried to open new stores but never succeeded because of the opposition of local communities. While continuing negotiations with Vermont municipalities, the company started building a series of stores outside the state’s borders. Progressively, Vermont was sealed by Walmart stores, which saturated the market without even entering it. Finally, Walmart was allowed to open a few stores in Vermont. Different but equally striking is the emergence of a peculiar form of urbanity in North West Arkansas (NWA MSA), always thanks to the presence of Walmart. Despite being a global company, Walmart’s management operations are still concentrated in a small area around Bentonville. What happened is that over the years, besides headquarters and other facilities, the region has attracted new investments, a huge number of people who decided to move there intrigued by elevated lifestyle expectations, and even tourism. Bentonville became a sort of Walmart theme park, whose main attraction was the Walmart Museum. New constructions and a new urban conglomeration – the Fayetteville-Rogers-Springdale area – are ‘defined by logistics, by mercantilism, and by a commitment to promoting the value of the free market not just as a means to profit but also as a belief system and as a way of life.’42 In other words, the entire region around Bentonville has been progressively privatized at the hands of its patrons, to become a fortress – the fortress of logistics. From Walmart, we will shift back to

Preface xxi Amazon, to map its presence in New York City and to examine its influence over Seattle’s political life. In Europe too, the presence of logistics architecture is growing every day. In particular, Eastern Europe has recently seen the proliferation of warehouses, logistics hubs, and new infrastructures that optimize the communication and transportation of goods around the continent. Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland are the four main countries affected by this process, constituting a continuous network of spaces and structures that have been called Steel City. In contextualizing the EXTERIORLESS paradigm, and in defining its distinctive characteristics, this book aims to question the intricate connection between capitalist production and architecture, but also interrogates the ability of the designer to envision possible alternative directions. The global city that acts in the background of the EXTERIORLESS is highly problematic, unequal, and segregated, and has emerged as a site for new claims: ‘by global capital, which uses the global city as an organizational commodity, but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban population, frequently as internationalized a presence in global cities as capital. The “denationalization” of urban space and the formation of new claims by transnational actors, raise the question: Whose city is it?’43 Architects and designers are called to respond to this open question, by acknowledging that, whether we are living in an epoch that is the Anthropocene, or that can be called the Capitalocene, a shift is happening: architecture’s scope is geo-political. It now operates at multiple scales simultaneously, incorporating different agents and different forms of life – human and non-human. The EXTERIORLESS represents some of capitalism’s most destructive forces; its spaces accommodate inequality, exploitation of workers, mass-consumer culture, surveillance, erosion of privacy, attack on public interests, and environmental destruction. Nevertheless, it is only by comprehending the EXTERIORLESS and its expanded logic, by recognizing its salient features as well as its impact, that we will be able to imagine other scenarios – scenarios that can embrace participation, inclusiveness, and diversity. In other words, the EXTERIORLESS not only describes a series of current problems, but it also contains in its interior the potential for change. How to exploit this potential will depend on collective efforts of analysis first and action second.

Notes 1. S.L.A.M. stands for Scan, Label, Apply, and Manifest. 2. Niccolò Cuppini,“Amazon: Quando la merce danza automatizzata sul lavoro-tapis roulant,”accessed September 23, 2021, http://www.intotheblackbox.com/articoli/ amazon-quando-la-merce-danza-automatizzata-sul-lavoro-tapis-roulant/. 3. Dara Orenstein, Out of Stock. The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 18. 4. See Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism. How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (London: ­ Bloomsbury, 2016).

xxii  Preface 5. Liam Young, “Neo-machine. Architecture without People,” AD. Machine Landscapes. Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene, no. 257 (January 2019): 13. 6. Ibid., 10. 7. Franco Bifo Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009), 21. 8. Young, “Neo-machine,” 10. 9. Ibid., 13. 10. Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Haywood, and Michael Ellis, “The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?,” Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society 369, no. 1938 (March 2011): 837. 11. Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Richard Fortey, Alan Smith, Tiffany L. Barry, Angela L. Coe, Paul R. Bown, Peter F. Rawson, Andrew Gale, Philip Gibbard, F. John Gregory, Mark W. Hounslow, Andrew C. Kerr, Paul Pearson, Robert Knox, John Powell, Colin Waters, John Marshall, Michael Oates, and Philip Stone, “Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene,” Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society 369, no. 1938 (March 2011): 1037. 12. Jason W. Moore, “Confronting the Popular Anthropocene: Toward an Ecology of Hope,” New Geographies, no. 9 (Fall 2017): 198. 13. Ibid., 198. 14. Jason W. Moore, “Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 6. 15. Jason W. Moore, “The Rise of Cheap Nature,” in Anthropocene or ­Capitalocene?, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 81. 16. Ibid., 82. 17. Ibid. 18. Elmar Altvater, “The Capitalocene, or, Geoengineering against Capitalism’s Planetary Boundaries,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 144. 19. Ibid., 144. 20. Ibid., 151. 21. Justin McBrien, “Accumulating Extinction Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 116. 22. Ibid. 23. Matthew Soules, Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin. Architecture and ­Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2021). 24. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York, NY: Public Affairs, 2019). 25. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso Publishing, 2014), 293. 26. Martin Coward, “Network-Centric Violence, Critical Infrastructure and the Urbanization of Security,” Security Dialogue 40, no. 4/5 (August/October 2009): 399–418. 27. Francesco Marullo, “Logistics Takes Command,” Log, no. 35 (Fall 2015): 103–120. 28. Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-click America (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 207. 29. Ibid. 30. Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism, 109. 31. Ibid. 161. 32. Andrea Branzi, Weak and Diffuse Modernity. The Worlds of Projects at the Beginning of the 21st century (Milan: Skira, 2006), 70.

Preface xxiii 33. Niccolò Cuppini, “Platform Urbanism and Conflicts in Northern Italy: Traditional Logistics, Amazon, and the Food-Delivery Platforms,” accessed September 23, 2021, http://www.intotheblackbox.com/articoli/platform-urbanism-and-­ conflicts-in-northern-italy-traditional-logistics-amazon-and-the-food-deliveryplatforms/. 34. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese, The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 79. 35. Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics. Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 4. 36. Marullo, “Logistics Takes Command,” 104. 37. Geoff Manaugh, “Infrastructure as Processional Space. Where Tomorrow Arrives Today,” AD. Machine Landscapes. Architectures of the Post-­ Anthropocene, no. 257 (January 2019): 38. 38. LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics, 13. 39. Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, The Cost of Free Shipping, 49. 40. Cuppini, “Platform Urbanism.” 41. Saskia Sassen, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept,” Brown Journal of World Affairs XI, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2005): 39. 42. LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics, 210. 43. Sassen, “The Global City,” 39.

Figure 1.1 Stefano Corbo, Life and Death in the EXTERIORLESS II, 2022. Courtesy: © Stefano Corbo

1

Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity

One of the symptoms of the intricate relationship between space, labor, and current capitalist development has to do with the ever-increasing number of giant corporations that are progressively taking the stage and are becoming dramatically powerful economic actors. Among them, it is easy to think immediately of Amazon: as pointed out by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese in The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, ‘of the world’s top 200 economic entities, 157 are corporations and 43 are governments. Even back in 2019, Amazon’s market capitalization was slightly more than the combined GDP of nine Latin American countries.’1 Amazon’s economic growth runs in parallel to its physical expansion: in the U.S. alone, Amazon acquired more space between 2016 and 2018 than it did in its first 20 years of operations, by summing around 24 million square meters. Not only warehouses but also offices, data centers, and other complementary facilities were built over the past years.2 In expanding its physical and economic influence, Amazon is also driving a transformation in the way warehouses and other logistics spaces are designed. While in Australia, demand for warehouses exceeding 100,000 square meters is skyrocketing, in the U.S., the local industry clear height has increased from 24 to 36 feet in the last two decades, which means that since rental costs for industrial spaces are calculated on a square rather than cubic foot basis, going up rather than going out seems to be the most efficient choice.3 The model put in place by Amazon is not totally new, as it partially derives from a ‘hub and spoke’ formula that was originally developed by airline companies in the 1950s. That consists in an air travel experience based on a large hub airport that constitutes the first leg of the journey; from there one can typically catch a shorter flight to a ‘spoke’ destination. Amazon – as well as other retailers and logistics companies – employs a similar idea: ‘large warehouses hold a fairly consistent collection of stock items, to be intermittently sent by road to high street outlets.’4 The spatial, typological, and territorial transformations that global companies such as Amazon are setting in place all across the world represent the epiphenomenon of a new state in capitalist production. The name given to this current condition has been subject to different readings which, as DOI: 10.4324/9781003251736-1

Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 3 mentioned briefly in the preface, gravitate toward old and new definitions. In particular, the role played by Amazon and other tech-companies has been often described within the larger framework of surveillance capitalism, a term coined a few years ago by Shoshana Zuboff. Zuboff’s initial assumption is that a paradigm shift has occurred: the shift from a twentieth-century phase that she calls managerial capitalism – ideated and perfected by General Motors – to a recent phase in capitalist development which has been pioneered by Google first, and by other tech-­ companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and partially Apple. To describe this current phase, Zuboff employs the definition of surveillance capitalism, where surveillance – in relation to data production and consumption – acts as the dominant logic of accumulation of our age. About a century ago, Henry Ford reduced the price of an automobile by 60%, by introducing a new industrial process aimed at mass production; Apple operates today in an analogous way by ‘tapping into a new society of individuals and their demands for individualized consumption.’5 Ford’s innovations revolutionized production; Google’s inventions revolutionized extraction.6 Through experimentation and implementation, tech-companies have transformed data from raw material to an instrument of social control and power. Google’s engineers and scientists, in fact, were the first to build a new space for market based on cookies, proprietary analytics, and algorithmic software capabilities. Behavioral surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms became the components of a new syntax, where the progressive datafication of power relations has taken, according to Zuboff, unprecedented asymmetries. In describing these asymmetries – mainly consisting in the reversed balance between public and private interests – Zuboff connects surveillance capitalism to the ‘neoliberal zeitgeist that equated government regulation of business with tyranny. This paranoid style favored self-­management regimes that imposed few limits on corporate practices. In a parallel development, the war on terror shifted the government’s attention from privacy legislation to an urgent interest in the rapidly developing skills and technologies of Google and other rising surveillance capitalists.’7 The complex dynamic between democratic institutions and tech-empires is far from finding a phase of stasis. On the contrary, actions and counter-­initiatives delineate a battlefield in which data – the way they are stored, managed, protected, and distributed – become one of the fundamental issues of our times. Zuboff’s analysis represents a unique perspective on the influence of Amazon and other companies for several reasons: it traces their evolution in relation to the experience of Fordism, and focuses attention on processes of data production and consumption which are undoubtedly critical in our societies – see Chapter 3 of this book on data centers and expanded domains. However, several are also the contradictory points that make the overall concept of surveillance capitalism insufficient to describe the

4  Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity complexity of agents currently operating on the global scene, as well as to understand the EXTERIORLESS and its spatial by-products: first of all, by resuscitating the term surveillance – whose overutilization often turns into a cliché – surveillance capitalism heavily relies on a sort of technological determinism that is typical of a certain area of the world but that is strongly rejected in others; second, surveillance capitalism seems to be a definition not broad enough, as it excludes from its narrative a series of modes in capitalist development that have to do with finance, or with global trade. Lastly, the power relations between public authorities and private actors that are at the base of the surveillance capitalism argument would probably take on a different connotation – less dramatic, or more nuanced – outside of the American territory. Although in the next pages the definition of surveillance capitalism will somehow reappear to describe some punctual episodes, this book maintains that in order to comprehend the logic of the EXTERIORLESS paradigm, it is necessary to examine capitalist development in its long-term projection – in other words, by understanding spatial and cultural phenomena in their longue durée. Here is where the work of Giovanni Arrighi comes into play and serves as methodological skeleton of the book. In his The Long Twentieth Century, Arrighi, inspired by Fernand Braudel’s ideas, focuses on the nature of capital accumulation in the ­t wentieth century; rather than examining the twentieth century as a chronological sequence of events, Arrighi regards capitalism according to a comparative analysis of systemic cycles of accumulation. In particular, Arrighi identifies four fundamental cycles to understand the way accumulation has generated changes in capitalist production: a Genoese cycle, from the fifteenth century to the early seventeenth century; a Dutch cycle, from the late sixteenth century through most of the eighteenth century; a British cycle, from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century; and a U.S. cycle, which began in the late nineteenth century and has continued into the current phase of financial expansion.8 Through the comprehension of these four cycles, Arrighi claims, it will be possible to look at the twentieth-century capitalism not as an unprecedented phase, but as the culmination of a long-term phenomenon. For Arrighi, as for Braudel, the essential feature of historical capitalism over its longue durée has been the eclecticism of capital, rather than the concrete forms assumed over the years in different places at different times. Therefore, if we look at historical capitalism as one extended world system, by stretching the horizon of our observations and conjectures, ‘tendencies that seemed novel and unpredictable begin to look familiar.’9 So, for instance, what we call high finance is, for Arrighi, in its capitalist form a Florentine invention, its foundations being laid at the end of the thirteenth century and the early fourteenth century: ‘Sienese businessmen had travelled to England and the northern kingdoms as papal collectors; and this business with Rome and on Rome’s account, which included such “invisible exports” as pilgrimages,

Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 5 indulgences, and dispensations, remained essential to the continental reach and prosperity of Florentine and Sienese banking houses throughout their hey-day in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.’10 Florence, along with other northern-Italian cities such as Milan, Genoa, and Venice, progressively developed an intercapitalist competition that provided the context in which capitalism as a historical social system came into being. Arrighi’s excursus throughout the centuries allows him to strengthen his argument and to focus on the last quarter of the twentieth century – the collapse of so-called Fordism-Keynesianism, and the rise of finance capitalism – whose analysis demonstrates that ‘the situation is not as unprecedented as it may appear at first sight. Long periods of crisis, restructuring, and reorganization, in short, of discontinuous change, have been far more typical of the history of the capitalist world-economy than those brief moments of generalized expansion along a definite developmental path like the one that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.’11 In analyzing the fourth cycle of accumulation in capitalist development, Arrighi describes the U.S. hegemony, and reads the turbulence of 1970s and 1980s as the result of specific military, financial, and political events: the problems encountered by the U.S. army in Vietnam; the impossibility by the U.S. Federal Reserve to preserve the regulation of the world monetary system as established at Bretton Woods; and lastly, the progressive loss of legitimacy of the U.S. government in their anti-communist initiatives.12 This turbulence, in Arrighi’s opinion, was progressively paving the way for a change of the guard at the command of the capitalist world economy, because ‘the displacement of an “old” region (North America) by a “new” region (East Asia) as the most dynamic center of processes of capital accumulation on a world scale is already a reality.’13 However, at the time of writing, Arrighi was mainly referring to the ascent of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Only a few years later, in the 2008 postscript to the second edition of his book, Arrighi will acknowledge the role of China as the center of the East Asian political economy representing a new case in the annals of capitalist history, since its growth has ‘deprived the West of one of the two most important ingredients of its fortunes over the preceding five hundred years: control over surplus capital.’14 If we stick to Arrighi’s scheme, we can say therefore that the non-­ territoriality of current global capitalism is not an uncommon phenomenon in history, but it can be read in its longue durée starting from Genoa’s cycle of capitalist accumulation, when Genoese merchant bankers set up a system of fairs without place – fairs that were periodically held in different cities of northern Italy and Europe, far away from the enclave of Genoa: ‘if Venice was the prototype of all subsequent capitalist states, the Genoese diaspora of merchant bankers was the prototype of all subsequent non-­territorial systems of capital accumulation on a world scale.’15 Genoa built a strategy of world-wide expansion based on a relationship of exchange with foreign governments. Genoa was a small city, military and socially weak compared

6  Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity to other great powers of the time. Yet, thanks to their flexibility and ability to set up financial networks with other governments, its capitalist class got to define a cosmopolitan nation, as powerful as most of other cities. Genoese merchant bankers, called nobili vecchi, were also the first, in the midst of a crisis, to abandon trade to become the bankers of the government of Imperial Spain. By restructuring their networks of trade and accumulation, Genoese merchant bankers became the most powerful capitalist class of the sixteenth-century Europe. Financial expansion didn’t begin and didn’t end with Genoese merchant bankers; on the contrary, ‘it was repeated three more times under the successive leadership and dominance of the Dutch, British, and U.S. capitalist classes. In this succession, financial expansions have always been the initial and concluding moments of systemic cycles.’16 Today, we can still testify how finance plays a leading role in capitalist development. Emphasis on finance and its spatial byproducts characterizes Matthew Soules’ work: in his Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin. Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, Soules introduces five architectural categories, different manifestations of the same regime: finance capitalism. This definition – and along with it the process of financialization – is at the core of Soules’ argument: finance capitalism permeates not only political discourse, but also sociology and spatial theory. Soules’ central idea is that contemporary capitalism is defined by – but not only limited to – finance. And to fully understand architecture in the twenty-first century, ‘it is imperative to understand its role within finance capitalism.’17 What is exactly finance capitalism? How can it be explained in the larger context of the twenty-first century? Soules’s argument intersects the work of French economist Thomas Piketty, who has recently published a series of compelling essays on wealth concentration and distribution. Especially in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century,18 Piketty looks at historical trends in wealth distribution to prove that distribution is essentially a political problem, in the sense that it reaches beyond mechanisms that are purely economic.19 Wealth distribution is also an issue that for a long time has been underestimated or simply ignored because of a supposed lack of reliable sources and historic data. In questioning this premise, Piketty develops his argument by studying different contexts: first, France and United Kingdom, given the availability of data that allow to reconstruct a certain trend. Then, gradually, Piketty extends his analysis to other continents too, in search for universal laws and comparable parameters. Between 1900 and 1980, 70-80% of world production of goods and services was concentrated in Europe and America, just to confirm the gap between those countries and the rest of the world. This relation has been constantly changing starting from 1970s, and today it is around 50% – that is, similar to the levels in 1860. 20 Parallel to that, starting from the 1970s, inequality in distribution in wealthy countries has progressively increased – especially in the U.S., where in the first decade of the twenty-first century wealth

Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 7 concentration has reached and slightly exceeded the record level of the 1910-1920 decade. From Piketty’s stratified analysis of capital over the past three centuries, Soules extracts especially his considerations on the phase of post-1980 capitalism: ‘finance capitalism as it has risen since 1980 emphasizes investing as the preferred form of capitalist activity, accelerating the rate of return on capital and therefore generating heightened inequality. The concentration of wealth in a small minority animates many of the dynamics that have come to be associated with today’s finance capitalism. Indeed, the very idea that the return on capital will be dependably higher than the return on labor is a proclamation of the significance of investing over production.’21 Soules borrows Piketty’s emphasis on inequality to find the reasons of such inequality in the evolution of finance capitalism. At the same time, departing from Piketty’s focus, Soules intends finance capitalism not as a monolithic concept, but as the component of a three-fold phenomenon, which includes neoliberalism and globalization. The relationship between finance capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalization is incredibly intertwined. For Soules, none of these three concepts can be fully understood in its complexity without considering the other two. If we stick to the general definition of neoliberalism – a set of economic policies based on privatization, deregulation, and progressive expansion of the private sector over the public – we can say that neoliberal practices favored the ascent of finance capitalism. Or, in other words, financialization operated in conjunction with neoliberalism. Processes of globalization, to complete the tripartite argument offered by Soules, allowed capitalism to deploy its dynamics on a multi-national and non-territorial scale. As commented earlier, such processes are not new. What changes now is that ‘the globalization of financial transactions is so integral to the world economies that it is hard to conceive of globalization without finance and vice versa.’22 What drives Soules’s attention are the years since 1980, where the word financial, as sociologist Greta R. Krippner claims, ‘refers to activities relating to the provision (or transfer) of liquid capital in expectation of future interest, dividends, or capital gains.’23 Data on the rise of finance capitalism since 1980s are eloquent: the stock market, for example, has grown radically. In 1980, there were 14,000 companies listed on the world’s stock exchanges compared to 43,000 now. 24 Also, in 1980, 13% of the population in the U.S. directly or indirectly owned stock. According to polling by Gallup, that number reached a high of 63% in 2004 and was at 55% in 2019. When people do not directly own stock, they often indirectly own it through such things as pension funds. 25 When it comes to the spatial byproducts of finance capitalism, Soules bases his analysis on an extended range of case studies from the U.S., China, and Europe, and on three main premises. First of all, Soules is convinced that finance capitalism directly influences all architectural production, although his work mainly addresses housing because it is in real

8  Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity estate where finance capitalism reveals its true nature. In particular, Soules takes into consideration the complex knot constituted by finance, insurance, and real estate summarized by the acronym FIRE. Second, Soules rejects the possibility for architecture to be autonomous, disconnected from external constraints or capable to resist major forces. For Soules, despite architecture possesses internal logics and principles that are unique to itself, there is no possible separation from the dynamics of capitalism. The third point has to do with symbolism: while Fredric Jameson was interested in considering buildings as representations of late-capitalism, 26 Soules regards buildings as instrumental components of finance capitalism. For Soules, buildings fulfill different roles: ‘providing shelter, manifesting culture, and embodying wealth. A building always provides protection from the elements. At the same time, by necessity, it embodies cultural ideas and practices. And because buildings require labor to design and construct and because they incorporate physical materials, they are always an embodiment of wealth.’27 Since 1980s, architecture became finance and finance became architecture. This change has affected how buildings are conceived, laid out, used, and managed. Also siting, scale, program, and aesthetics have changed. Soules develops his arguments further and presents us with a series of concrete architectural episodes, paradigmatic of finance capitalism: iceberg homes, exurban investment mats, superpodiums, ultra-thin pencil towers, and financial icons. Some of these spaces serve as providers of investment liquidity, while others are simply sites of wealth storage. In their combined action, they express the presence of capital in the built environment. The definition of iceberg homes refers to what happened in several wealthy areas of London – see Chelsea, Mayfair, Knightsbridge – where the implementation of very strict zoning regulations that limit above-the-ground additions, along with the absence of regulations regarding building activity below the ground, favored the diffusion of new building practices: Victorian mansions and other townhomes were transformed through the addition of two to three subterranean spaces. Iceberg homes, to some extent, refer to the analysis that Thomas Piketty conducts in his work on growing inequality in most advanced capitalist economies, since the gap between a growing limited number of very wealthy individuals and the rest of the population has also resulted in the proliferation of architectures designed specifically for this group of new rich. Exurban investment mats are the second category introduced by Soules, and have to do with a financial typology that accommodates mainly middle or lower income inhabitants out of the existing urban fabric. Exurban investment mats are built through standardization and repetition of basic construction units, and represent the main vehicle of the so-called urban sprawl. The third example are the superpodiums, typically towers characterized by the combination of a vertical element – dwellings – and a horizontal plateau containing mixed functions: retail, entertainment, and parking. As stated by Soules, ‘in many respects,

Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 9 the podium tower is a perfect neoliberal avatar, a post-political middle ground between the diminutive premodern scale of the town house and the large scale of mass-housing towers.’28 On the contrary, the fourth spatial products introduced by Soules – ultra-thin towers – are exclusively residential, and their shape is directly related to the price of land in the era of finance capitalism. This is why pencil towers emerged in Hong Kong in the 1980s during the city’s housing cost ascent and, still today, Hong Kong has the highest number of slender towers in the world. Ultra-thin towers not only proliferate in Asia; also New York, especially Manhattan, has seen a recent growth in the construction of such towers by renowned architects like Christian de Portzamparc – see the One57 project – and SHoP – see the project at 111 West 57th Street. The last category of spaces described by Soules – financial icons – is broader, and less tied to a specific typology. Financial icons have to do with the role played by architecture in attracting and stimulating investments, similar to the so-called Bilbao Effect – named after Frank O. Gehry’s project for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, whose construction served as a catalyst to progressively reshape the image of the city, generate new investments, and attract millions of tourists. Financial icons have to be formally exuberant, materially and visually different from the context they are located in, and have to promote innovation as an ideological vector. The architecture of finance capitalism is real and virtual at the same time, as it functions on the verge between material, concrete existence, and the immaterial, abstract realm of finance. Above all, the rise of finance capitalism has ‘diminished the traditional conception of architecture as human shelter and replaced it with a post-shelter financial functionality that is comparably abstract and immaterial—comparably fictitious. By continuing to inhabit this relatively abstract and dematerialized yet real city of finance, the human subject becomes a fictional character in its own financialized reality.’29 What the human subject has become or can potentially become depends on the entanglement between neoliberalism and globalization. At the core of this entanglement is the EXTERIORLESS, whose deployment includes diverse forms of human/non-human interaction, as well as assemblages with machines. In this respect, one might say that the EXTERIORLESS also describes a post-human scenario. The post-human is one of those terms that can have multiple connotations. While Cary Wolfe, thanks to the contributions of cybernetics and systems theory, identifies first traces of a post-human thinking back to the second half of the twentieth century, Pramod K. Nayar focuses his attention on recent developments of the term post-human. Starting from mid 1990s, contributions on posthumanism have taken two divergent directions.30 The first direction is a vision of posthumanism coming from cinema and pop culture – ‘a hagiography of techno-modifications of the human, arguing that technological and biological modifications will improve the human, by allowing humans to coexist

10  Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity with chemically, surgically, technologically modified bodies and/or in close conjunction with machines and other organic forms (such as body parts from other life forms through xenotransplantation). This implies that there is a distinctive entity identifiable as the human, a human self, or person which can do with some improvement. This version of posthumanism is usually referred to as transhumanism.’31 On the contrary, the second direction within the territory of the post-­human is what Nayar calls critical posthumanism.32 Critical posthumanism rejects the idea that humans are unique, and also that humans have a right to control the natural world. To human exceptionalism and instrumentalism, critical posthumanism opposes the assumption that ‘the human should be treated as co-evolving, sharing ecosystems, life processes, genetic material, with animals and other life forms. Also, technology is not a mere prosthesis to human identity but is integral to it.’33 Nayar and many other authors advocate for the second direction that a discourse around the post-human can take, by stressing how posthumanism has the ambition to fabricate a new conceptualization of the human. This is why ‘posthumanism studies cultural representations, power relations, and discourses that have historically situated the human above other life forms, and in control of them.’34 In a critical post-human vision, the human ‘can no longer be separated from material (including organic – plants and ­animals – and inorganic), technological, and informational networks; its very consciousness depends upon these networks (of which it is not the dominating agent).’35 While the discourse around posthumanism is not among the main themes of the book, one must recognize that human/non-human relationships are what concerns life and death in the EXTERIORLESS: in some cases, such a relationship translates in the total absence of humans – see data centers or part of fulfillment centers, spaces conceived to be occupied only by machines. In other cases, the tension between the human and non-human materializes in the struggle between labor and automation. Automation doesn’t only represent a technological frontier. Automation has become one of the main tools at disposal of contemporary capitalism to extend its pervasiveness and to celebrate its achievements. When introducing automation in the EXTERIORLESS, it is once again inevitable to begin with Amazon. One of Amazon’s main claims is that their fulfillment centers are based on the presence of robots – in 2019, Amazon boasted that it had placed more than 200,000 robotic drives worldwide. 36 In seeking to reduce labor costs and improve efficiency, over the years, Amazon has invested in the research and development of robots as well as digital scanners, automated conveyor belts, labeling machines, and other devices. Besides robots, in fact, each fulfillment center is often characterized by miles of conveyors and skates that transport goods from the inbound areas to the interiors of the warehouse and then to the outbound. Workers are placed at various points in the facility to pick,

Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 11 pack, wrap, and S.L.A.M. goods. Within this process, automated guided vehicles help optimize transportation and reduce processing times for goods to be shipped. New automated machinery is currently being tested: Amazon is planning to use these devices to possibly replacing some of the most common packing tasks: these machines ‘can pack between 600 and 1,000 objects per hour – far more than a human can under the best conditions.’37 Amazon’s ultimate goal is to fully automate its warehouses as well as its delivery service. To do that, Amazon not only needs to invest in new technologies but also needs to set up a process to track, map, and surveil the activities of current workers to understand their movements and identify opportunities for technological support or replacement: ‘this process occurs through the collection of thousands of hours of motion studies every day, tracking the movements of over 400,000 workers throughout 8–10hour shifts around the world. This data can then be analyzed for improvements that seek to maximize workplace efficiency rather than to make the workstations more ergonomically suited to the human body, or to make the work safer or healthier.’38 Data collection not only applies to workers inside the facilities; Amazon also tracks the movement of delivery vehicles, as well as the activities of delivery drivers – breaks, delays, driving methods, etc. In other words, what Amazon does is to extract possible valuable information from workers’ everyday workflow to further exploit them and develop workplace automation. As we will see in the following chapters, the work Amazon does with the data of their ‘own workers’ is probably a testing ground for a potentially far more important portion of their business: recently, in fact, Amazon started working with federal, state, and local government agencies ‘to ­support police, surveillance and data collection activities, and to aggregate datasets across these levels to establish massive sets of information on residents of the U.S. and other countries. This includes contracts to provide technology and services to agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Border Patrol, and the National Security Agency (NSA).’39 In this respect, labor exploitation at Amazon matches perfectly the definition of surveillance capitalism given by Shoshana Zuboff. In Amazon’s workplaces, scanners are probably the most privileged tool to discipline workers: as reported by Jason Struna and Ellen Reese in their interviews-based report, ‘the devices at the time of writing are hand-held, mounted to workstations, or carts, and are used to electronically read various kinds of barcodes, worker IDs, or other labels tracking goods and their routes from receipt to storage and shipping. In some tasks, scanners direct workers through digital displays and monitors, and track output digitally to allow management to ensure that workers carry out their designated tasks at a profitable speed, regardless of the distances required to walk, or the volume of goods passing through their hands.’40 The introduction of these technologies into workplaces has

12  Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity produced multiple consequences; it has not only supposedly optimized speed and accuracy but also has progressively modified labor conditions by exerting additional pressure on workers to move, place, and arrange more quickly: ‘many workers noted that although they were given a 15-minute break every 3½ hours spent working, the actual time spent resting was sometimes only 5 minutes, due to how long it took to walk to and from break rooms.’41 This obsession for high performance has sometimes triggered extreme reactions: between 2013 and 2018, it was reported that emergency services responded to 189 calls from 46 Amazon warehouses in 17 states, all relating to suicidal employees.42 As commented by Alec MacGillis in his Fulfillment. Winning and Losing in One-click America, ‘you have to worry more about the supervisors, you have to worry about the cameras, and you have to worry about the algorithm. The company had an automated system to track performance – productivity, time off task – and the system would flag you for termination if you lagged. That is, you could be fired by an algorithm. About three hundred people were fired for inefficiency at the Broening Highway warehouse (Baltimore, MD) over a thirteen-month stretch in 2017 and 2018.’43 Whether the jobs currently performed by humans at Amazon’s facilities will be one day totally replaced by automation or not, it is not clear. Most likely, the nature of those jobs will change, becoming connected to assistance or maintenance of machines and technologies. What is certain is that, despite Amazon’s claims and investments, the quest for full automation is very far away from turning into reality. And human labor still plays a fundamental role in its workplaces. This is why, as suggested by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese, Amazon’s model embeds the forces, the contradictions, and the future directions in capitalism: ‘the exploitation and dehumanization of workers; extreme wealth inequality; an obsessive mass-consumer culture; surveillance; the erosion of privacy; monopolistic practices; the assault on the ecological integrity of the earth.’44 The interconnection between automation and labor is and will be one of the decisive battlefields for the future of capitalist production. Will automation liberate humans from low-skilled and alienating tasks? Or will automation turn into even more repressive practices of surveillance and social control? In The Soul at Work, Franco Bifo Berardi suggests that ‘capitalism isn’t content only with our bodies; it now demands our minds, even our souls. Automation is turning us into automatons, because technology more in general is changing the format of cognitive activity.’45 Contrary to Berardi’s analysis is Benjamin H. Bratton’s faith in automation, in the sense that pervasive and large-scale automation will bring, in his opinion, to a re-division of labor in which humans will do more and better: ‘in familiar macroeconomic labor flows, we see manufacturing robotics replacing human assembly lines in some contexts, and humans replacing expensive machinery in others.’46 Most importantly, Bratton invites to

Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 13 think about the inevitability of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) as a basis for progressive economics, a model in which ‘initial phases of pervasive automation may simply make existing technical-economic systems more automatic: automated stock markets, automated trains, automated warehouses sorting, automated tomato picking, automated whale oil bottling, etc. New jobs would emerge, it is assumed, so that perhaps the more abstract planning of the now-automated work occupies humans.’47 Also, in his recent essay The Revenge of the Real, Bratton insists on the redeeming potential of automation and technology, by predicting that ‘long-distance remote robotics will allow for manufacturing and service industries in U.S. cities to employ persons on other continents as easily as call centers do now. Automation will recompose the home’s interfaces to the urban exterior. Urban architecture will grow new prostheses dedicated to the principles of touchlessness.’48 While Bratton’s conjectures are characterized by an unwavering faith in technology as well as by a dangerous idea of subjects as objects, the current power relations in the EXTERIORLESS seem to be describing a scenario more similar to Berardi’s alarming analysis. Nevertheless, in embedding automated modes of production, the EXTERIORLESS and its spatial byproducts – see warehouses, fulfillment centers, container terminals – are allowing us to detect specific processes of subjectivation, a new horizon in the complex interplay between the human and the non-human. This interplay includes conflict, resistance, resilience, and concerns labor – how labor is performed and exploited. To understand these dynamics, we can’t simply focus our attention on technological development. Nor we can simply celebrate technology as a liberating tool. On the contrary, we can read the role of automation in capitalism – and by consequence, in the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS – in relation to biopolitics. Over the years, the concept of biopolitics has served as a fundamental interpretative lens to analyze a wide spectrum of phenomena – from the study of post-war welfare states in Western countries, with their interventions in the field of healthcare, education, and public services, to the study of mass-consumption and consumerism.49 Biopolitical dynamics manifest themselves across two distinct forms: on the one hand, via the ensemble of techniques that control and surveil – see the Panopticon; on the other hand, via the idea of governance as a series of vital processes, or exchanges between State and citizens. In this book, the reference to biopolitics doesn’t mean to describe hopeless or nihilistic scenarios. On the contrary, biopolitics is here intended in its possible positive connotation, by envisioning a constructive confrontation between citizens and forms of power. The EXTERIORLESS generates processes of subjectivation that are not only detrimental but that can also pave the way for different and alternative futures. Should we reconstruct a genealogy of the term biopolitics, and examine how it moved to the center of the international debate, we would mainly

14  Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity need to refer to Michel Foucault’s work. However, besides his contributions, the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito recognizes at least three waves of interest in biopolitics occurring from the early twentieth century to our days.50 The first wave has to do with a series of essays written in German, inspired by a vitalistic or organicist conception of the State, and by the work of the Swede Rudolf Kjellén, who is claimed to be the first to employ the term biopolitics – first in a 1905 essay titled The Great Powers and then, in the 1916 essay The State as a Form of Life. The second wave of interest in the thematic of biopolitics is registered in France in the 1960s: ‘the difference from the first wave is all too obvious and it couldn’t be otherwise in a historical frame that was profoundly modified by the epochal defeat of Nazi biocracy. The new biopolitical theory appeared to be conscious of the necessity of a semantic reformulation even at the cost of weakening the specificity of the category in favor of a more domesticated neohumanistic declension.’51 The third wave of biopolitical studies took place in the Anglo-Saxon world and it is one that is still ongoing. Its beginning can be officially detected in 1973, when the International Political Science Association officially opened a research committee on biology and politics. Today the term biopolitics has become the instrument of a ‘a bitter philosophical and political fight over the configuration and destiny of the current age.’52 In this context, the reference to Esposito is not accidental: his contributions, in fact, don’t limit themselves to a historic reconstruction of the term biopolitics. Esposito’s positions, on the contrary, have recently gained great attention because they constitute a compelling alternative to the polarizing debate on life and power, crystalized around the work of Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Toni Negri. As we will see in the following pages, their interpretation of biopolitics diverge for many aspects; yet, both Agamben and Negri understood that after the linguistic turn, ‘another transition was happening, which has at its center the question of bios. Or, expressed differently, they understood that the transcendental of our time, its constitutive category, is life and no longer language.’53 Toni Negri, especially through his collaboration with Michael Hardt, regards biopolitics in a positive tonality – as an encompassing category that includes all possible social relations. According to Negri, even production is biopolitical: it produces not only goods but also the producer – their subjectivity, their affects, their modes of communication.54 In combining Spinoza, Marx, and Deleuze, Negri emphasizes the role of subjectivity in political processes, and focuses attention on the constructive and vital elements of biopolitical dynamics in order to outline the possibility of a revolutionary horizon led by the multitude, ‘the only social subject capable of realizing democracy, that is, the rule of everyone by everyone.’55 The multitude is not made of individuals, but it is formed by singularities that act in common, able to rule themselves. Contrary to Negri’s, Giorgio Agamben’s position

Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 15 is extremely negative, as he connects biopolitics to one of the key concepts of his work – the so-called state of exception that separates bare life (zoe) from political forms of life (bios). Agamben accentuates the tragic aspect of biopolitics by building up his argument through the work of Heidegger, Schmitt, and Walter Benjamin, and through the epitome of the Nazi camp. For Agamben, the Nazi camp is, in fact, the biopolitical paradigm of the West – ‘a management technology best suited to the production of bare life on the threshold, whether that naked life is territorially situated in the West or not. The sovereign keeps on abandoning its subjects, creating naked life in order to defend society and the state starts treating its own citizens as potential enemies and outsiders. As the logic of the camp becomes more generalized in society, the production of naked life is thus extended beyond the concentration camp’s walls. The camp replaces the polis as the contemporary biopolitical paradigm. The camps not only become camps for the disadvantaged, but also for the advantaged, in the form of gated communities and other solipsistic enclaves for the wealthy in the city of splintered urbanism and other places.’56 In Agamben’s philosphy, the reference to the camp can be therefore inscribed within the general discourse on what he calls state of exception. To illustrate this concept, Agamben examines different cases and experiences in history. He begins with the so-called iustitium, an instrument at disposal of the Senate in Roman Republic in case of riots or wars which allowed to suspend any law and the administration of justice, to then mention the Military Order of November 13, 2001 issued by President George Bush, which authorized indefinite detention and the trial on behalf of military commissions of non-citizens suspected of terrorist activities. In between, Agamben focuses on Nazism, and on the state of exception issued by Adolf Hitler once he took power. Hitler suspended all the articles in Weimar’s Constitution concerning individual freedom. This act was never lifted, so that the Third Reich can be considered, from a juridical standpoint, as a state of exception which lasted for 12 years. 57 In opening a gap in any national rule of law, the state of exception presents itself as a temporary measure aimed to safeguard the existence and the safety of the community. To quote Agamben, the state of exception is not a form of dictatorship, but a space deprived of law, a zone of anomia in which distinction between public and private as well as all juridical determinations are deactivated.58 While Agamben’s positions have progressively become more and more radical, what one can take of his reading is the metaphor of the camp as an epiphenomenon of the so-called state of exception. Does the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS perform a similar role? Are port areas, data centers, and logistics architectures states of exception? Do they constitute extrastate zones, to paraphrase Keller Easterling? These open questions will be addressed in the following pages. The positions expressed by Negri and Agamben outline two antithetical perspectives: in one, power negates life (Agamben); in the other, life

16  Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity neutralizes power (Negri). In other words, as expressed by Esposito, ‘life either appears to be seized and trapped by a power destined to reduce it to a mere biological stratum, to “bare life,” or politics appears to be subsumed and dissolved into the productive rhythm of a constantly expanding life.’59 In confronting this polarity, Roberto Esposito takes a position that tends to merge aspects of both readings, although he himself will say that ‘as to the relation between my perspective on biopolitics and that of Negri and Agamben, I would say that it is situated not in a median point between them, but is external or indeed nonconcentric to them. Of course, a common element is shared by all: for each of us research in biopolitics begins from the point when Foucault’s work was interrupted, in the sense that all our investigations attempt to respond to the underlying question with which Foucault ended: what is the nature and meaning of biopolitics? Are we to understand it as a process that is substantially positive, innovative, and productive, or rather as something negative, as a lethal retreat from life?’60 Esposito shares other common points with Negri and Agamben: for all of them, biopolitics allows to underline the impossibility to extract and separate individuals from collective political dynamics. From this premise derives the assumption that life is not either simply a biological or metaphysical process. Life can only be thought in relation to and in confrontation with the categories of history and politics.61 In acknowledging analogies with Agamben and Negri, yet recognizing the divergent character of their positions, Esposito attempts to provide ‘a different interpretive key that is capable of reading them together, while accounting for the antinomical relation between them. All done without renouncing the historical dimension, as Agamben does, and without immediately collapsing the philosophical prospective into a political one, as Negri does. As you know, this hermeneutic key, this different paradigm, is that of immunity.’62 Immunization is the guiding light of Esposito’s philosophy. Originally applied to the medical and juridical spheres, the notion of immunity has extended over time to all other sectors of our life, becoming a crucial aspect of the entire contemporary experience: ‘one might come to affirm that it wasn’t modernity that raised the question of the self-preservation of life, but that self-preservation is itself raised in modernity’s own being, which is to say it invents modernity as a historical and categorical apparatus able to cope with it.’63 The notion of immunization can only be comprehended in relation to the idea of community – and here again the points of contact with Agamben and Negri. Immunitas and communitas become the antinomy introduced by Esposito to describe his own interpretative scheme. Both terms have the same root – munus – which in Latin signifies gift, obligation, and office. But one, communitas, has a positive connotation, while the other, immunitas, has a negative one. Communitas is what binds individuals in a contract or commitment one toward the other – members of a community are characterized by an obligation of gift-giving thanks to the law of the gift.64

Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 17 Immunitas is its reverse: it implies the exemption from or the derogation of such a condition of gift-giving. Immune is therefore the one excluded from a common condition – safe from obligations or dangers that concern everyone else. This is especially evident in the juridical language, ‘whereby the person endowed with immunity – parliamentary or diplomatic – is not subject to a jurisdiction affecting every other common citizen. But it is similarly recognizable in its biomedical meaning whereby natural or induced immunization implies the organism’s capability to resist, by means of its antibodies, the infection of an outside virus.’65 In reflecting on the unstable relationship between the two terms, Esposito concludes that ‘if communitas brings about a breach of the protective barriers of individual identity, immunitas attempts to rebuild them defensively and offensively against any outside element threatening it: hence, the necessity and risk contemporaneously present in the immunization dynamics increasingly widespread in all fields of contemporary experience.’66 Even if necessary to protect our life from possible enemies, immunity ends up negating life itself when taken beyond a certain threshold. Life becomes a cage where we lose the ultimate sense of our individual and collective life that Esposito identifies in the social circulation. What protects the body – whether this is the individual, social, or political body – is at the same time what potentially threatens it, risks destabilizing its existence. From this perspective, one can say that immunization is a negative form of protection of life. It saves and preserves the organism, but it doesn’t do it directly. On the contrary, it subjects the organism to a condition that negates or reduces its power to expand. For Esposito, ‘just as in the medical practice of vaccinating the individual body, so the immunization of the political body functions similarly, introducing within it a fragment of the same pathogen from which it wants to protect itself, by blocking and contradicting natural development.’67 The contradiction intrinsic to the concept of immunity is what Esposito tries to highlight and to use for his interpretation of biopolitics: to some extent, immunization embeds the positive and the negative, the constructive and the destructive. What protects the individual and political body is also what impedes its development, the fully enjoyment of the social character of existence. After all, negation is not only ‘the violent subjection that power exerts on life from the outside, but the contradictory way with which life tries to put up a defense by closing itself to what surrounds it – to the other life.’68 In celebrating this contradiction and the interdependence between immunitas and communitas, Esposito outlines the possibility for a potentially affirmative notion of biopolitics. Although, because of the experience of Nazism, biopolitics has taken on a dimension that Esposito calls thanato-political (politics of death), the Italian philosopher is convinced that we need to rethink politics from the very phenomenon of life: ‘when life is understood in its irreducible complexity, as a multidimensional phenomenon which is, so to speak, always beyond itself; when it is considered in its

18  Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity depth, stratification, and discontinuity, in the richness of its phenomena, in the diversity of its manifestations, in the extremeness of its transformations, the scenario changes. At that point, the living will become not only a spring of inspiration for new questions to be posed in the political discourse, but also the pivot that can reverse completely the perspective of such a political discourse. How might we consider a politics that views life no longer as its object but rather as its subject? A politics, therefore, no longer on life, but of life?’69 These are questions that only collective efforts can address, by recognizing, like Roberto Esposito maintains, that no individual can be excluded by a social dimension, and that even the most negative and frightening phenomena contain in their interior the potential for redemption. Immunity can become community. Automation can become liberation from alienating labor. With this hope, one can conclude this exploration around biopolitics by borrowing some of the words that Benjamin H. Bratton employs to describe his own vision, which paradoxically aligns smoothly to Esposito’s quest for communitas: ‘in a positive biopolitics, the conception of oneself becomes less an interiority occupied by private voice and experience and more a medium through which the physical world signifies itself.’70

Notes 1. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese, The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 31. 2. Jessica Wood, “A Glimpse into a Dark Future: Amazon’s Logistics of Extraction and the Illusion of Efficiency,” Strelka Magazine, accessed March 18, 2022, https://strelkamag.com/en/article/jessica-wood-amazon-logics-of-extraction. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019), 29. 6. Ibid., 85. 7. Ibid., 340. 8. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso Publishing, 1994), 7. 9. Ibid., 23. 10. Ibid., 97. 11. Ibid., 1. 12. Ibid., 304. 13. Ibid., 348. 14. Ibid., 380. 15. Ibid., 84. 16. Ibid., 130. 17. Matthew Soules, Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin. Architecture and ­Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2021), 12. 18. Thomas Piketty, Il Capitale nel XXI Secolo (Milano: Bompiani, 2014). 19. Ibid., 43. 20. Ibid., 100. 21. Soules, Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin, 172.

Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 19 2. Ibid., 49. 2 23. Ibid., 34. 24. Ibid., 38. 25. Ibid., 39. 26. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 27. Soules, Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin, 34. 28. Ibid., 93. 29. Ibid., 343. 30. See Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014). 31. Ibid., 6. 32. Ibid., 8. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 3. 35. Ibid., 79. 36. Kim Moody, “Amazon: Context, Structure and Vulnerability,” in The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, eds. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 54. 37. Jason Struna and Ellen Reese, “Automation and the Surveillance-Driven Warehouse in Inland Southern California,” in The Cost of Free Shipping. ­ ­Amazon in the Global Economy, eds. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 261. 38. Sheheryar Kaoosji, “Worker and Community Organizing to Challenge ­Amazon’s Algorithmic Threat,” in The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, eds. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 506. 39. Ibid., 501. 40. Struna and Reese, “Automation,” 244. 41. Ibid., 255. 42. Wood, “A Glimpse into a Dark Future.” 43. Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment. Winning and Losing in One-click America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 210. 44. Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, The Cost of Free Shipping, 59. 45. Franco Bifo Berardi, The Soul at Work. From Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 21. 46. Benjamin H. Bratton, “On Automation in the Stack,” Volume, no. 49 (September 2016): 11–15. 47. Ibid. 48. Benjamin H. Bratton, The Revenge of the Real. Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (London: Verso Publishing, 2021), 165. 49. Enzo Traverso, “Biopotere e Violenza. Sugli Usi Storiografici di Foucault e Agamben,” Contemporanea 12, no. 3 (July 2009): 523–30, https://www.jstor. org/stable/24653194. 50. Roberto Esposito, Bios. Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 13–19. 51. Ibid., 21. 52. Ibid., 13. 53. Roberto Esposito and Zakiya Hanafi, “The Return of Italian Philosophy,” ­Diacritics 39, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 57, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23252696. 54. Jorge Álvorez Yágüez, “Biopoder: Dos Perspectivas (Agamben y Negri),” Pasajes 32, no. 32 (Spring 2010): 104–19, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41446083. 55. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Multitude. War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 100.

20  Capitalism, Architecture, Subjectivity 56. Richard Ek, “Giorgio Agamben and the Spatialities of the Camp: An Introduction,” Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 88, no. 4 (2006): 369, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4621535. 57. Giorgio Agamben, Stato di Eccezione (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), 10. 58. Ibid., 66. 59. Roberto Esposito and Santo Pettinato, “From the Unpolitical to Biopolitics,” Annali d’Italianistica, no. 29 (2011): 211, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24016422. 60. Roberto Esposito, Timothy Campbell and Anna Paparcone, “Bios, Immunity, Life: The Thought of Roberto Esposito,” Diacritics 36, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 50, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20204125. 61. Esposito and Hanafi, “The Return of Italian Philosophy,” 61. 62. Esposito, Campbell, and Paparcone, “Bios, Immunity, Life,” 50. 63. Esposito, Bios, 54. 64. Esposito, Campbell, and Paparcone, “Bios, Immunity, Life,” 50. 65. Esposito and Pettinato, “From the Unpolitical to Biopolitics,” 209. 66. Ibid. 67. Esposito, Bios, 46. 68. Esposito and Pettinato, “From the Unpolitical to Biopolitics,” 211. 69. Ibid., 213. 70. Bratton, The Revenge of the Real, 35.

2

Interface

When we think of the constitutive elements of our cities – roads, railways, water systems, power grids, and now information technology – we tend to regard them as neutral structures designed to facilitate our everyday life. In reality, as any serious historical reading of urban planning from Greek-Roman times until today can prove, those structures allowing the deployment of our collective actions are only formally neutral: instead, they ‘remain, each and every one, uniquely ideological in how they realize particular strategies for organizing their publics.’1 As lucidly outlined by Henri Lefebvre, space is never neutral; space has orientations, means, and filters, and is always the materialization of pre-determined power structures.2 These power dynamics translate in a prescriptive series of actions or directions to take, whose goal is social and physical control. While Lefebvre’s reading was totally immersed in the 1968 culture and in the analysis of specific conditions – the relationship between capitalist production and the bourgeoisie’s ideological instruments–, Gilles Deleuze, in one of his last writings – Postscript on Societies of Control – seems to grasp a shift happening in historic cities from older disciplinary modes, based on the presence of schools, factories, and prisons, toward a new control model, characterized by the tracking of any self-directed movement through inscribing those in larger networks of data and information.3 Today, more than 50 years after Lefebvre’s contributions, one may say that the city is still a set of forms, spaces, and facilities ideologically charged, but new episodes have progressively taken the floor to symbolize the role played by architecture in contemporary capitalism. What typically is called infrastructure space is in reality a medium of information: ‘the information resides in invisible, powerful activities that determine how objects and content are organized and circulated. Infrastructure space, with the power and currency of software, is an operating system for shaping the city.’4 When looking at retail/food supply logistical chains, as well as at other specific byproducts such as data centers, warehouses, or container terminals, one can recognize that, despite their different size, shape or presence, those spaces are media, in the sense of platforms conceived to act as connectors among different agents, whose existence has to meet the demands for DOI: 10.4324/9781003251736-2

22  Interface efficiency, high-performance, and just-in-time distribution. This condition of bridging, accumulating, and distributing resources constitutes the first characteristic of the EXTERIORLESS – its condition of interface. This chapter aims to define the nature and the historical genesis of the EXTERIORLESS as interface, by associating its byproducts with emblematic architectural proposals of the past. At the roots of the complex entanglement between space, capitalism, and subjectivity characterizing the EXTERIORLESS, is, in fact, a variegated corpus of ideas that have informed the discourse around architecture over the last decades and that have, consciously or unconsciously, influenced the way the EXTERIORLESS is designed. Yet, the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS are something more than forms. In borrowing the definition of infrastructure space provided by Keller Easterling, one can say that the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS are ‘forms, not like a building is a form; they are updating platforms unfolding in time to handle new circumstances, encoding the relationships between buildings, or dictating logistics.’5 In other words, the relevance of the EXTERIORLESS as interface lies in its capacity to act as a bridge, node, or plateau depending on the circumstances. Furthermore, the term interface recalls a more-or-less direct connection between subjects and objects – that is, the connection between the physical platforms designed to serve a certain purpose and the agents operating in or within it. To some degree, the term interface implies involvement – either active or passive – and suggests, as we will see in some cases, the idea of confrontation. In intending them as ‘a complex matrix harboring of all kinds of social habits, cultural values, economies, and technologies,’6 interfaces can, in fact, also become the testing ground for new experiments and forms of dissensus. Once outlined their genesis, analyzed their deployment, and read the processes of subjectivation they trigger, the interfaces of the EXTERIORLESS will probably appear as spaces that need to be urgently reconceived. To better understand the implications of the term interface for an architecture of the EXTERIORLESS, one may compare this term to similar ideas that have emerged recently. Benjamin H. Bratton, for example, employs the word interface in his account of the Stack, a personal interpretation of the current relationships between sovereignty and the physical forms it takes. The Stack is, for Bratton, ‘an accidental megastructure, one that we are building both deliberatively and unwittingly and is in turn building us in its own image.’ 7 It is a machine literally circumscribing the planet, which produces new spaces in its own image: ‘clouds, networks, zones, social graphs, ecologies, megacities, and formal and informal violence.’8 Bratton’s notion of the Stack is organized across six interdependent layers, moving from the global to the local, from the geochemical to the phenomenological: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User. The relationship among these six layers is explained by Bratton in these terms: ‘a User (animal, vegetable, or mineral) would occupy its own

Interface 23 unique position and from there activate an Interface to manipulate things with particular Addresses, which are embedded in the land, sea, and air of urban surfaces on the City layer, all of which can process, store, and deliver data according to the computational capacity and legal dictates of a Cloud platform, which itself drinks from the Earth layer’s energy reserves drawn into its data centers.’9 While the term interface is used by Bratton to indicate those membranes through which users can interact with the Stack, compelling in his description is the role played by the City layer, as well as the biopolitical mechanisms of surveillance that allow its functioning and perpetuation. The City, in fact, equals the world, rendered as ‘a conjunctive grid wrapping a closed informational array within the arrangements of urban totality.’10 Contrary to Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society, characterized by specific architectural typologies, new control models are shaping the City. If the disciplinary society was imposed through the architecture of schools, factories, prisons, office buildings, and barracks, we are now moving toward a new individualized model where the City is a network of ‘ATM PINs, key cards and parking permits, e-tickets to branded entertainment, personalized ­recommendations from others who purchased similar items, mobile social network transparencies, GPS-enabled monitoring of parolees, and customer phone tracking for retail layout optimization. In the control City, there may not be a Foucauldian disciplinary gate because there is no outside, to which anyone might escape.’11 The manifestation of the EXTERIORLESS as interface shares some analogies with Bratton’s description of the City layer in the Stack: both designate a spatial and ideological medium for human and non-human actors, whose impact reaches beyond their boundaries. If boundaries – whether they are spatial, legal, or personal – continuously change, and if the EXTERIORLESS is an expanded condition, local and global at the same time, one might say that we face a situation of radical pervasiveness that produces the disappearance of the outside, intended as a physical and psychological condition. In engaging with that, the role of the designer also changes. Bratton suggests that designing with and for the Stack means designing at multiple scales simultaneously but, most of all, means to forget human-centered design: ‘we need to design for what comes next, what comes outside, what has already arrived, for the synthetic Usersubjects for which another geopolitics is derived. These come from the division, segmentation, and multiplication of partial and compound Users into diagonal organs, both bigger and smaller than any one body or person. In this, the geopolitical design problem is drawn as a planetary resorting and redistribution of envelopes, interfaces, and membranes, hard and soft, enabling forms of political sovereignty and geography that will enforce a more adventurous futurity.’12 Some of the limits of Bratton’s contributions have already been emphasized in Chapter 1: an optimistic faith in technology, a banalization

24  Interface of class struggles, and the absence of any interest for issues of labor – unless it is fully automated. Nevertheless, his theory of the Stack represents an original attempt to situate recent spatial manifestations – in his own case, especially data centers and other places where robotics can play a role – in a broader context. Also, Bratton, along with other authors we will mention later, is extremely spot on in identifying a specific moment in time for the emergence of structures and spaces that served as inspiration for the current byproducts of capitalism. The platforms shaping the City layer of the Stack, in fact, have their origin in the utopian megastructures of the 1960s, as well as in other experimental projects inspired by various sources: cybernetics, 1968 counterculture, and Soviet planning schemes. For Bratton, ‘we can see aspects of these utopian projects in the City layer today and recognize their evil doppelgangers as well. This is possible perhaps because the Stack works as both a control mechanism and a means to open up and flatten access, providing one because it provides the other, and so it is not surprising, then, that it would discover the legacy of utopian megastructures through this very reversibility.’13 The perverse connection between progressive proposals of social, political, and technological reform (by different and contradictory means, as we will see) and the wildest examples of capitalist spatial byproducts is very well explained by Douglas Spencer, who focuses most of his recent attention on what he calls the architecture of neoliberalism.14 In his analysis, Spencer takes a step further: contrary to the definition of EXTERIORLESS given in this book, Spencer opts for a broader perspective, by extending his argument to almost the entirety of the contemporary discourse in architecture and of its manifestations. Yet, his radical approach allows us to critically question some of the aspects emerging from the current disciplinary debate, as well as to identify with more clarity the origin of the EXTERIORLESS. Spencer’s target is a conception of space that in his opinion shares the same values and the same rituals as neoliberal thought, based on the absence of hierarchy, enthusiasm for spontaneous ordering, and self-organization. The architectures of Greg Lynn, Zaha Hadid, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Farshid Moussavi, Reiser + Umemoto, Lars Spuybroek, and many others are for Spencer exemplificative of this position, even if their designers are typically considered progressive and disruptive in their agenda. What also characterizes the work of these architects, according to Spencer, is a problematic reading of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, which Spencer calls Deleuzism. Architectural Deleuzism, for Spencer, consists in progressive depuration of Deleuze’s thinking from any Marxian register in order to only focus on Bergsonian and Spinozian registers.15 Over the years, a generation of architects has appropriated Deleuze’s lexicon by translating some of his key concepts into a set of formal operations. The result of this appropriation process has produced a conception of the

Interface 25 ‘new’ in architecture that first of all helped architects to distance themselves from other movements such as Postmodernism – generally considered politically conservative, if not reactionary. Moreover, ‘the term “new” indicated an orientation towards a philosophy of invention itself. At this point philosophy was conjoined to an exercise in academic marketing: the new as invention conflated with the new as rebranding of an architectural avant-garde.’16 In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello argue that contemporary managerial theories based on de-hierarchization and networked forms of organization did not originate in the production process but in a critique of capitalism, which was then opportunistically appropriated by capitalism itself.17 Once depurated by their intrinsic antagonism, those theories have become managerial literature, detached from the previous context of criticality. For Douglas Spencer, something similar happened in the territory of design and architecture too: one may recognize, for instance, that the current invasion of objects and devices from the Silicon Valley – iPhones, self-driving cars, Google maps – epitomizes the institutionalization of the 1968 Californian counterculture with its practices and its celebration of the individual as one conceived in terms of freedom and creativity. Not only because the spirit of that counterculture turned eventually into a sort of techno-utopian entrepreneurialism but also because, if freedom gets to signify entrepreneurial freedom, and if any attempt to contrast inequalities by regulating economy systems is perceived as a threat to personal initiative, then one can see how connected historically the counterculture of California and the rise of neoliberal thought have been. Similar to the Californian counterculture’s emphasis on individual freedom, neoliberalism is a project aimed at the depoliticization of its subjects: ‘rather than as a species of political animal, an Aristotelian zoon politikon, neoliberalism conceives of the individual subject as the bearer of its own human capital.’18 The subject becomes an entrepreneur of himself, ‘all qualities, innate (the subject’s genetic make-up) or acquired (education, training, etc.), are thus functions of human capital – they can be invested in or regulated by the subject in order to make its enterprise more productive, profitable, and credit-worthy.’19 The dangerous encounter between the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS and neoliberalism has followed a similar pathway as the one described by Boltanski and Chiapello, being its genesis rooted in the experimentations of the 1960s, when a group of young d ­ esigners – mostly based in England, Italy, Austria, France, and Japan – began to rethink the relationship between capitalist production and space in forms that at the time were considered naïve, unrealistic, and extreme. However, despite the original degree of provocation driving those proposals, over the years, the visions and ideas of those groups have been gradually distilled, reinterpreted, watered down, and depurated from their most radical components to be

26  Interface eventually transformed into reassuring positions that have played a significant role in influencing the mainstream architectural production. More specifically, the following pages take into examination two critical moments for the formation of the EXTERIORLESS. The first moment, as mentioned above, has to do with the series of proposals developed around the 1960s and 1970s by groups such as Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, and other designers such as Cedric Price and Constant. In their heterogeneity, the proposals of these designers outlined a variegated panorama, characterized by analogies as well as by profound differences, especially in relation to the social and political role of architecture. The second moment is successive and dates back to the end of 1980s. It takes inspiration from the term Bigness, as ideated by Rem Koolhaas, and describes a shift in intention and architectural manifestations that will occupy also part of the 1990’s production. The progressive dismantlement of public control in the making of the city, also deriving by the rise of neoliberal policies, produced a self-confinement of architecture within its own physical boundaries. Architecture abandons any engagement with the city to itself become the city. The world is now inside. Interiors become a micro-universe of activities and events. Bigness preannounces the advent of the EXTERIORLESS.

Interface 27

Figure 2.1  Cedric Price, Vehicles Equipped for Auto Link and Rapid Transit Servicing (Atom Project), 1967. Reprographic Copy with Caption in Graphite on Paper, 45.7 × 69 cm. Courtesy: © Cedric Price Fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture

28  Interface

Figure 2.2  Michael Webb, The Cushicle, 1966. Notes:  Listed as Stage 1 in  Archigram, Edited by Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron & Mike Webb, 1972 [Reprinted New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999]. Courtesy: © Michael Webb Archives

Interface 29

Genesis or Prefiguration In 1964, the then 28-year old Peter Cook presents for the first time the iconic Plug-in City, one of the best-known images of Archigram’s repertoire. Around a series of vertical cores are attached modular dwelling units growing in spontaneous and unpredictable directions. Megastructures and the building-in-becoming are the two overarching themes of a provocative proposal based on the rejection of urban planning’s modernist tradition. Against the organization of the city through separated functional zones, Plug-in City is presented as an assembly – a potentially infinite combination of ‘physical components with an array of media devices and systems, a loose gathering of enclosures, partitions, screens, robots, pads, projectors.’20 The interaction among these components produces an urban experience which is far from being determinate and stable. While city planning had traditionally worked on the idea of fixed architectural objects, Plug-in City amplifies the existence of different urban flows – information and people – and testifies the shift from buildings to devices, from aesthetics to behaviors. Like in any contemporary fulfillment center or logistics hub, Plug-in City offers continual circulation, reproducibility, smooth communication, and flexibility. Labor is not represented in Plug-in City: factories or other workplaces are not visible because Archigram share ‘the common 1960’s ambition that repetitive physical labor should be ended by automation.’21 Much has been written about the speculative scenarios envisioned by Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio, and others. It is not the intention of this book to examine their general contributions, but simply to describe the relevance of their work in regard to the materialization of the EXTERIORLESS. Analogies between some of those projects and the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS are not simply confined to evocative images of screens, portable devices, or conveyor belts. The way Archigram and others anticipated what the EXTERIORLESS has become takes the shape of three different aspects: the relationship that these groups established with technology and, more in general, with the capitalist modes of production; their interest in megastructures; and a common skepticism in the role of the architect that can be expressed in the famous slogan ‘architecture without architects.’ The combination of these aspects will clarify the influence that the radical proposals of the 1960s have exerted on the formation of the EXTERIORLESS and will also serve to distinguish, within the heterogeneous set of proposals developed by their authors, ­different visions and directions. The first aspect through which the 1960’s debate prefigured an architecture of the EXTERIORLESS has to do with the tension between technology and design. If nowadays automation, robotics, and portable devices constitute the EXTERIORLESS’ fundamental agents of space management, the emphasis on technology, whether from a critical, sarcastic, or celebrative perspective, has fully animated the body of proposals proliferating in the 1960s and 1970s.

30  Interface Reyner Banham was one of the first to address his analytic efforts not only toward the spatial characteristics of the buildings but also toward the impact that applied technologies could have on those same buildings, in terms of control and performance. Banham’s contributions can be summarized in his constant quest for an alternative to the Modern Movement’s message based on the new technological conditions and, above all, on the radical critique to the concept of functionalism. Banham began to use the phrase ‘architecture of technology’ in the early 1960s, as part of his conviction that postwar architectural culture was defined by a stark dichotomy between tradition and technology: ‘the radical opportunity of an architecture of technology lay in envisioning architecture out of the changing forces of technological development, rather than looking to accommodate new technologies to established architectural forms and functions.’22 Banham used to word technology not only to describe machines but also to indicate in technology a force that can radically change human experience and thought. For Banham, architecture was no longer a question of form and function, but was the result of a tension between science, profession, and history. Form and function were replaced by tradition and technology. Ultimately, Banham’s intention was to displace functionalism toward a wider field that could include topology, genetics, technology, and informatics. To some extent, what Banham proposed was a scientific aesthetics: an aesthetics that works as a basis for scientific laws and observations. One of the indirect products of this cultural milieu is the Fun Palace (1961), an unbuilt project derived by the collaboration between the theater producer Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price – synthesis of Price’s multiple interests: cybernetics, information technology, game theory, and situationism. All of these ingredients converged into something that was no longer a building, but an interactive dispositive – an ever-changing architecture that worked according to cycles of assembling and destruction. As a designer, Price believed that his task was to implement buildings’ performance, their functioning, and their temporal-programmatic configuration. Second, by acknowledging the impossibility to control all aspects in buildings’ life cycle, Price was convinced that architecture should contain in its interiors a certain degree of indeterminacy, so to favor future changes and unexpected uses. During the Fun Palace’s design process, also thanks to the cooperation of Gordon Pask, Price could explore those and other ideas, by investigating the forms in which social, biological, and mechanical systems self-organize, self-regulate, and evolve. Pask’s contribution to the project consisted in instituting a Cybernetic Commission, whose main objective was to define new environments capable to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the users and, at the same time, capable to stimulate different modalities of participation within the building. In order to achieve this goal, user main preferences would have been recorded via electronic sensors, and an IBM 360-30 computer would have processed those data in order to extract general principles that could eventually lead to define criteria of spatial modification.

Interface 31 When looking at Price’s diagrams and non-representational schemes for the Fun Palace, in fact, it seems clear that drawing turned into a simulation of possible functions, a technique of management – a dataset similar to the one employed by network operation centers in many container port terminals around the world to track, govern, and direct the traffic flows of containers. The Fun Palace program, rather than in its conventional correspondence to fixed architectural spaces, was therefore a set of algorithmic functions that were supposed to control events and processes. By doing so, for the first time, the dream of a virtual architecture came true. The environment envisioned by Price in the Fun Palace is an ever-flowing world, in which time and performance shape a (open) notion of form. Such a notion implies the redefinition of traditional disciplinary categories. The interior-exterior dialectics is replaced by an undefined infrastructural framework that rejects any idea of formal tension among its constitutive elements. Like any architecture of the EXTERIORLESS, the Fun Palace doesn’t have facades; it doesn’t have plans or drawings, only diagrams. Interior and exterior merge into an atmospheric process of flows: within the building, different flows interact with each other and can produce infinite configurations. When it comes to technology, Price’s vision was, to some extent, diverging from the one of other groups such as Archigram: Price, who charged his work with a strong political connotation, confronted technology in a more critical or disenchanted fashion. Technology can be one of the many possible instruments to improve material conditions, or to monitor architecture’s performance within a global urban context. But it can’t be the ultimate aim, or telos, of architectural ideation. On the contrary, Archigram’s fascination for technology as the fuel of the future permeated any moment of their design activity. Their proposals can be inscribed in the general relationship between culture and capitalist development: as Paul Davies and Sean Griffiths pointed out, ‘Archigram redefined architecture as a problem of consumption rather than one of production. They recognized that by the mid-twentieth-century freedom consisted, not in gaining control of the means of production, but in gaining control of the means of consumption.’23 Furthermore, in their work, Archigram celebrated pop culture as a response to the distinction between high and low culture, incorporating in their lexicon the kitsch and the inauthentic. They were persuaded that social change might occur ‘not through a sudden revolution of subjects linking arms, but by an irreversible escalation in the day-to-day demands of ordinary people for greater access to goods, services, and culture. Archigram were willing to see the transformation of the working class as the work of that class became automated, making us all bourgeois if need be.’24 According to Simon Sadler, Archigram thought that pop culture could somehow ‘divert market mechanisms and the military-industrial complex to the benefit of social progress, much as the avant-gardes of the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s hoped they could recoup industrialization for

32  Interface socialism.’25 In other words, Archigram seemed to accept the existence of a social model based on capitalist modes of production/consumption. Rather than questioning its ideological premises, Archigram were more interested in rethinking architect and architecture’s role within such a context, as in their work any political connotation has always been replaced by irony, sarcasm and, of course, technological optimism. Archigram attempted to take advantage from the possibilities offered by market economy – see their pop imaginary, for instance – to transform these into design instruments. Projects such as Cushicle (1966), Blow-out Village (1966), or Suitaloon (1967) are representative of this attitude. While Suitaloon is a sort of second skin, an electronic suit that reacts to the user inputs by potentially turning into a micro-house, the Cushicle explores the relationship between portable media and flexible building systems, by presenting a telescopic armature that opens out into an inflatable membrane. This membrane protects against the environment and serves at the same time as a projection screen. Audiovisual screens cease to be external planes to become protective surfaces and extensions of human touch. The Cushicle is a nomadic unit, a multi-functional device that celebrates individual freedom as well as a new lifestyle. Blow-out Village, instead, is a mobile structure that can be used in case of emergency and natural disasters, or just for temporary events: hydraulics fluids allow to inflate an enormous dome. Inside the dome, housing modules can be installed. When in disuse, the village shrinks, reduces its dimensions up to disappear. These projects not only express the role played by technology in envisioning new environments but are also paradigmatic of the homo novus Archigram aimed to shape via their visions, which celebrate ‘the coming together of all manner and types of man and the way in which they interact upon one another in the shared experience of living city. The masses are in fact aggregates of individuals, freed from the yoke of collectivism by their own, personal agendas for the city.’26 If we think that years later, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher will say that there is no such a thing as society, but only individuals, Archigram’s attitude seems to therefore respond perfectly to what Spencer called the architecture of neoliberalism. To summarize their ‘accomplishment,’ we might borrow Simon Sadler’s words in saying that ‘Archigram reorient architecture toward changing social and ideological patterns, recognizing that individualism and consumerism were the prevalent postwar European and American social movements.’27 If Archigram’s projects investigated architecture in relation to individual consumption, the Milanese collective Archizoom ventured into an opposite direction: their projects explored critically the role of architecture in capitalist production. Their provocative proposals don’t offer ‘an alternative to actual reality as it is, but rather they represent reality as it is in a new critical light. Their utopia is simply a tool: it represents itself, it is not a prefiguration of another model of the system… it is a critical hypothesis of the system itself.’28 In envisioning scenarios that are at the same time cynical and

Interface 33 lyrical, Archizoom articulated an urban theory based on a process of annihilation – destruction of forms and values. In one of their most renowned projects, No-Stop City (1969), Archizoom dissolve the built structure of the city into its constitutive infrastructural elements – column, elevator, wall, etc. – by envisioning it as an expanded artificially lit, air-conditioned interior. Differences, such as inside and outside, landscape and city, living and working, are collapsed into one equipped surface that is extendable in all directions along a grid. Here the grid is neither a visual element nor a functional one, nor even a circulation system. It is simply the most rational and economic means to distribute the necessary elements of the city without recurring to any architectural gesture. Architecture, therefore, disappears: it reduces to a sequence of a toilette unit every 50 meters. Dwelling loses its traditional formal connotation too and acts as an extended parking area. ‘Thus No-Stop City formalizes the conditions that make the city. Neither a proposal for a new city nor a utopian transformation of the existing city, No-Stop City is a conceptual X-ray of the existing capitalist metropolis.’29 As pointed out by Andrea Branzi, Archizoom’s founder, ‘in 1969 the No-Stop City – a non-figurative architecture for a non-figurative society that no longer had an external form but had infinite internal forms – prefigured the central role of industrial products, merchandise, furniture, and services in the construction of fluid settings in the contemporary metropolis. The city corresponds to the dimension of the global market and the system of networks spread across the land. The citizen is not he who lives in the city, but he who uses the industrial products and information supplied by telecommunications.’30 No-Stop City aims to be both a physical and a social entity – continuous and undifferentiated – constituted by the optimized circulation of information. If Archigram – through an optimistic rhetoric based on the celebration of technology – implicitly accepted the economic and political context in which they worked, Archizoom employed ironic drawings and provocative texts not only to question Fordism and the capitalist means of production, but also to describe both architecture and urban planning’s incapacity to manage complex processes. Today, in the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS, technology reappears both as an instrument of control and as a space organizer: the portable devices envisioned by Archigram are not actually liberating the individual from any imposing authority but are, at the moment, creating new forms of surveillance over the users and the workers occupying its spaces – see Amazon’s warehouses. Similarly, human labor has not been replaced yet. As we will see in the following pages, some of the so-called logistics parks arising in Eastern Europe over the last years are a perfect example of the contorted relationship between labor, space, and technology. These compounds of anonymous industrial sheds, which are typically built in the semi-periphery of medium-sized cities, pretend to be updated with the most advanced tools in automation technologies. In reality, they are mainly inhabited by humans. Unrecognizable from the exterior, their

34  Interface interiors are occupied by thousands of workers. Some commute every day from distant cities, others stay directly in the near villages. Something similar can be said for other spatial byproducts we will investigate later, such as container terminals or fulfillment centers. Especially in fulfillment centers, where conveyor belts and robotic devices let imagine an automated future, human workers are still playing a fundamental role: ‘cyborg-like dreams of human-robot cooperation are far from being removed from the reality of work in automated landscapes. On the contrary, automated workplaces follow an assembly system where humans and machines operate autonomously through a sequential division of tasks.’31 The second aspect prefiguring the EXTERIORLESS has to do with the scale and the organization of its architectures. In analyzing container terminals, warehouses, data centers, and other spatial byproducts of current capitalism, we can first of all read those spaces as assemblages of different components, technological or not. Furthermore, in their interdependency, those spatial byproducts transcend the conventional size of a single building or infrastructure to become something else, which plays a role on a regional, territorial, and trans-national scale. Rather than regarding the buildings of the EXTERIORLESS as punctual episodes, we have to start looking at them as nodes or connections of multi-layered networks all doomed to a similar destiny: to guarantee performance and high-efficiency, with no disruptions. To some extent, the disengagement from the traditional scale of architecture has been anticipated, once again, by several heterodox proposals that began to proliferate in the 1960s, characterized by the use of megastructures as a main vehicle for the definition of new urban models. In retrospect, those projects revealed an approach to design which is common to the EXTERIORLESS – an approach that reaches beyond the separation between architecture, infrastructure, and landscape. The work of Constant Nieuwenhuys is part of this group of proposals, aimed to imagine a new architecture for a new society. In his New Babylon, an anti-capitalist city developed between 1959 and 1974, Nieuwenhuys envisions a ludic society, opposed to the utilitarian society, where men and women, freed from any obsession for production, can develop their creativity. A ludic society is a society without classes, in which freedom depends on a horizontal social structure and on technology. In New Babylon, work is completely automated: the time spent in the factory turns now into otium, entertainment. The formal translation of these intentions is a series of megastructures capable to shape a fluctuant community based on nomadism, telecommunications, and audio-visual media. New Babylon is organized across main sectors – autonomous but interconnected units that accommodate dwellings, hospitals, research centers, and libraries. Generally, each sector is a skeleton that extends over a 20–30-hectare surface, at a height of 15 meters, thanks to the use of pilotis. Each sector has an independent electricity grid, and can control climatic parameters

Interface 35 self-sufficiently. Also, each sector contains mobile sub-structures that citizens can interact with: they can easily transport, assemble, and dismantle the pieces that compose them. Mobility – intended as the continuous transformation of the physical characteristics of the city – also creates a new lifestyle: a nomadic life within an artificial atmosphere, an environment entirely defined by human desires. The polemical and naïve character of Constant’s proposal can’t impede to acknowledge the influence that New Babylon exerted on various generations of architects; also, in envisioning an environment which is mobility-oriented, where labor is automated, and where life is precarious because unstable, Constant’s project ends up describing, although his intentions were exactly the opposite, some of the characteristics belonging to neoliberal space. Constant’s interest in megastructures was shared by other designers such as the Florence-based group Superstudio. Active in the same years as Archizoom, Superstudio developed an ambiguous lexicon, where information, technology, politics, visual arts, and theater coexisted in the same environments. In their project for the Genoa Airport (1970), a prefabricated construction system constituted by identical modular entities, and an open structural grid allowing for infinite extension, generates automatically the image of the building. Once liberated from expressive problems, the generic configuration of the airport is counterbalanced in its interiors by the presence of furniture, different lighting conditions and microclimates. In 12 Città Ideali (12 Ideal Cities, 1971–1972), Superstudio explore the relationship between technology and megastructures. The 12 cities are constituted by a center of artificial intelligence that regulates distinct functions: walls, roofs, and membranes depend on such a sophisticated system – a reference to Dennis Crompton’s Computer City. In the same years (1972), Superstudio participate in the competition for the restoration of the Roman Amphitheater in Cagliari. This proposal recalls both Archigram’s Instant City and Cedric Price’s Fun Palace: a performative mobile megastructure, constituted by hydraulic platforms, cranes, and spaces for flexible events, wraps the Roman ruins giving them a new meaning. Parallel to Città Ideali, Superstudio present Supersuperficie (Supersurfaces) – a shapeless platform, with no architecture and no physicality: ‘the Supersurfaces photomontages continually displace the element of an interior into external landscapes. Such exteriorization of the interior produced a scenario for narrating a life disencumbered of objects, yet in such images, the exterior could equally appear interiorized, domesticated by a largely invisible technological network.’32 This process of interiorization characterizes both Superstudio’s Supersurfaces and the EXTERIORLESS. The Supersurfaces envision a scenario where design as an inducement to consume ceases to exist and new things come gradually to light33; the exterior becomes a tabula rasa, stripped of history and meaning – a technological grid which can potentially be applied everywhere. Similarly, the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS

36  Interface are smooth and abstract surfaces – not only occupied by humans, but mainly by goods and information. In addition to that, the 1960–1970’s explorations on megastructures – most expressed through modularity, extendibility, reproducibility, etc. – implied the idea of working around basic universal modules that, by aggregation and grouping, could activate larger ensembles. A similar approach drives space organization in the EXTERIORLESS, whose generative elements are not capsules, nor dwelling units; they are shipping containers and Class A warehouses. The introduction of shipping containers, for example, as they were classified in 1968 according to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), represented not only the divide between old and new ways to conceive freight transport by pushing the boundaries of modern logistics, but also served as a reference unit for a series of architectures and spatial byproducts that today inform the EXTERIORLESS. Among them, the so-called International-standard Class A warehouse is a typified structure with specific dimensions, whose construction module derives from the proportions of ISO containers. As we will see in Chapter 3, Class A warehouses are based on a rectangular grid of 12 × 24 meters, and can be easily assembled or dismantled. If Archigram and others built their visions out of specific and recognizable components – the grid, the capsule, the crane – both the shipping containers and the Class A warehouses have been instrumental to the relentless expansion of the EXTERIORLESS. The last aspect of the 1960’s architecture influencing the EXTERIORLESS is the progressive disinterest in formal and expressive questions as a consequence of a new conception in the role of the architect. From the multitude of radical proposals presented in those years, in fact, emerges a new sensibility. On the one hand, for Superstudio, Archizoom, Archigram, or Cedric Price – despite the evident differences among their positions – the architect has to be a destroyer, in the sense that their role consists in dismantling the traditional corpus of principles and rules that have been characterizing the disciplinary territory since millennia. When talking about Cedric Price and his legacy, Rem Koolhaas affirms that: ‘in every discipline exist builders and destroyers: our attention focuses on builders, even though destroyers are more rare and essential for the future. Price is a destroyer. Unfortunately, his triumph is not visible in terms of tangible production; his few built works were at the same time fascinating and repelling, paradox of a genius that was self-eliminating from the plot making himself indistinguishable from reality.’34 On the other hand, the architect is no longer a deus ex machina; for many designers operating in the 1960s and 1970s, architecture has to be an open and democratic process, in which no patronizing mediation between individual desires and their translation into space is necessary. Any user can choose, modify, and customize the environment they live in, without the guidance of an architect. In referring to those informal urban settlements built over time in the Mediterranean or in the Middle East

Interface 37 by an anonymous and collective intelligence, whose formal characteristics adapted to the climatic and topographic specificities of the context, a new generation of designers claimed the necessity of an ‘architecture without architects.’ If architecture doesn’t need architects, then any individual can act as a designer and can shape their own vital space. Humans are themselves architecture: they don’t need theaters, schools, and hospitals. Humans only need a generic surface to colonize – see Superstudio’s Supersurfaces. Similarly, the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS only needs surfaces to occupy in order to extend its local and global control. Those surfaces are diagrams, datasets of transnational flows. There are no designers involved in their conception. There is no symbolism. Communication takes place through smoothness and performance. Architecture itself transforms into performance, unfolded within an open and ever-changing temporal interval. As claimed by Cedric Price, if in the past architecture was always conceived in terms of space, now the decisive factor is time. By consequence, architecture needs neither an interior nor an exterior to exist; interior and exterior are situations. Space, like people and objects, is now in flux. Other contributions aimed to dismantle the traditional role of the architect came from the Austrian scene, and especially from Hans Hollein, who in 1968 published Alles ist Architektur, Everything is Architecture – the programmatic manifesto of a nouvelle vague of designers. Everything is Architecture because, thanks to technology, we can radically rethink spatial and tectonic aspects of buildings. Also, Everything is Architecture because everything can be associated and interiorized within architecture’s speculative spectrum. By critically questioning the possibility for architecture to be autonomous, Hollein attempted to redefine its scope and its operative boundaries. In this respect, Craig Buckley writes that ‘Everything is Architecture enunciated an expansive confidence in an expanded discipline, one able to appropriate the widest array of objects and environmental media. Such appropriation could take the form of enlarging the definition of the architect, evident in a spread that assembled photos of the designer Paco Rabanne, the painter Roberto Matta, all of whom had studied architecture. More commonly, taking possession echoed a pop interest in the culture of mass consumption.’35 Should we transfer those reflections around the role of architecture and architect to the context of the EXTERIORLESS, we could easily connect the absence of authorship from the design of its spaces to the noninfluence that architects are currently exerting on society. By coincidence or not, in fact, with the rise of neo-liberal models, the role of the architect has progressively become marginal: ‘the recognition by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, for example, that many commercial buildings had become little more than backdrops to billboards or neutral enclosures for media-driven experiences highlighted the problem of architecture having become a commodity

38  Interface and its practitioners an interchangeable labor pool.’36 Parallel to that, many of the cases described before anticipate what the EXTERIORLESS expresses today – a totalitarian, all-encompassing idea of technology capable both to anthropize natural processes and to build new living environments, as well as to transform existing material and intellectual conditions. From such a perspective, any sort of environment can be regulated through technology. By consequence, technology progressively reduces the architect’s social relevance, up to neutralize their responsibilities and their know-how. Several of the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS – see data centers and automated container terminals – depict even more extreme scenarios, since not only human-centered desires are often supplanted by business-­ oriented logics but, also, humans are completely excluded by those spaces and are replaced by machines. In particular, data centers seem to be the materialization of Superstudio’s speculative visions: architecture – and its designers – is reduced to the minimum, to an air-conditioned interior where climatic parameters are carefully controlled to prevent servers from overheating. The landscape emerging from the disappearance of architecture are computers, racks, white spaces, power rooms, and cooling areas.

Interface 39

Figure 2.3  OMA, Euralille, Lille, 1989–1994. Entrance to the Euralille Shopping Center, Lille. Courtesy: © Velvet

Figure 2.4  Foster and Partners, Apple Park, Cupertino, 2017. Aerial View. Courtesy: © Arne Müseler

40  Interface

Liberating the Exterior The liberation of architecture from its exteriors has been a long process which began, as seen before, with the first visionary proposals of Archigram and others, and was finally completed during the decade of the 1980s when, in overcoming the last postmodern currents, architecture faced a new phenomenon: Bigness. The word Bigness was employed for the first time by Rem Koolhaas at the beginning of the 1990s in an article published in the Italian magazine Domus (1994), which then converged in his famous S,M,L,XL (1995). Although most of the Bigness ingredients were already present in the exhibition Fin de Siècle: OMA Rem Koolhaas, held at the French Institute of Architecture in Paris (March 1990), S,M,L,XL represents, in Koolhaas’ trajectory, the sequel of Delirious New York – the first moment in which the Dutch architect could reflect on the contemporary city and its relationships with the architectural forms that populate it. The culmination of a captivating intellectual journey initiated with Delirious New York, Bigness is as a sort of finite and well-defined theory which, as pointed out by Gabriele Mastrigli, took on a centrality in the architecture discourse that has been prolonging for at least a decade, marking the development of architectural culture since World War II, and constituting ‘an extremely lucid attempt to draw to a conclusion a history that goes back to the very invention of the modernist city.’37 Via Bigness, Rem Koolhaas announces architecture’s disengagement from the city through size, programmatic instability, and the disconnection between interior and exterior. In separating architecture from the destiny of the city – to better say, in replacing the city with Bigness – Koolhaas is also declaring the liberation of architecture from old constraints, by engineering the unpredictable proliferation of events: ‘the exterior of the city is no longer a collective theater where “it” happens; there is no collective “it” left. The street has become residue, organizational device, mere segment of the continuous metropolitan plane where the remnants of the past face the equipment of the new in an uneasy standoff.’38 In Bigness, Koolhaas also elaborates a peculiar concept of freedom which equals architecture’s freedom with individual freedom – freedom from formal coherence equals freedom from the social and spatial contract. Bigness is blank, bland, and neutral architecture, deprived of any message; Koolhaas will say that ‘where there is nothing, everything is possible. Where there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible.’39 From Delirious New York to S,M,L,XL, Koolhaas traces a continuity line, by convincing himself that ‘multiple fluid programmatic use, compacted into large areas, creates a condition of maximum potential for desirable life.’40 The Downtown Athletic Club, a vertical social condenser located in Manhattan, New York City, is probably the epitome of what Koolhaas is trying to prove – the celebration of a culture of congestion that abandons the city to still be part of it under renovated forms: ‘Manhattanism is the

Interface 41 one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition – hyper-density – without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. Manhattan’s architecture is a paradigm for the exploitation of congestion.’41 Symbol of the schizophrenic accumulation of diverse activities within the same building, the Downtown Athletic Club, built in 1909, is an incubator, a dispositive capable to trigger desires. Each of the 39 platforms the building consists of is an abstract composition, a fragment of New York’s whole urban life. What the Downtown Athletic Club proposes is a maximum degree of density in conditions of total isolation. Density, in the case of Manhattan skyscrapers, manifests itself as a vertical process of layering. But density can also be achieved through the so-called typical plan: ‘typical plan is neutral, not anonymous. It is a place of worship. Its neutrality records performance, event, flow, change, accumulation, deduction, disappearance, mutation, fluctuation, failure, oscillation, deformation.’42 For Koolhaas, architecture is no longer the unitary outcome of a single creator but is a generic product, undefined, capable to accommodate the unexpected. By building upon the culture of congestion detected in Manhattan, 15 years after Delirious New York, Koolhaas presents the concept of Bigness, and delineates its five main characteristics: 1 Beyond a certain critical mass, a building becomes a Big Building. Such a mass can no longer be controlled by a single architectural gesture. This impossibility triggers the autonomy of its parts, but that is not the same as fragmentation: the parts remain committed to the whole. 2 The elevator and its family of related inventions render null and void the classic repertoire of architecture. Issues of composition, scale, proportion, and detail are now moot. The art of architecture is useless in Bigness. 3 In Bigness, the distance between core and envelope increases to the point where the façade can no longer reveal what happens inside. The humanist expectation of honesty is doomed: interior and exterior architectures become separate projects, one dealing with the instability of programmatic and iconographic needs, the other – agent of disinformation – offering the city the apparent stability of an object. Where architecture reveals, Bigness perplexes; Bigness transforms the city from a summation of certainties into an accumulation of mysteries. What you see is no longer what you get. 4 Through size alone, such buildings enter an amoral domain, beyond good or bad. Their impact is independent of their quality. 5 Together, all these breaks – with scale, architectural composition, tradition, transparency, and ethics – imply the final, most radical break: Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. It exists; at most, it coexists. Its subtext is fuck the context.43

42  Interface Koolhaas’ argument gravitates around some key concepts that have translated, over the years, in a diverse range of operative strategies. Federico Bilò summarizes Bigness according to realism, program, indeterminacy, instability, neutrality, and accumulation.44 Architecture, or what remains of it, is now not a formal problem anymore. Nor aesthetics will inform its production. On the contrary, Bigness is mainly about program: programmatic juxtaposition that generates various events within the same container. Their accumulation produces zones of instability as well as of indeterminacy, as Bigness is ‘one architecture that engineers the unpredictable.’45 In hosting the proliferation of events and unexpected uses, Bigness means neutrality: architecture gives up any symbolic or expressive ambition to turn into a giant container. Bigness also means artificiality: it exists because of elevators, escalators, air conditioning, and artificial lighting. Without embracing technological development, there wouldn’t be Bigness. And there wouldn’t be the city. But Bigness doesn’t need the city, as it is not capable to establish relationships with the traditional city anymore. Bigness competes with the city; it negates the city; eventually, Bigness is the city. The consequences of Bigness for the understanding of the 1990s’ architectural production are at the same time compelling and alarming. Over the years, Koolhaas himself – with his office OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) – has been testing the validity of his ideas through a series of projects that have explored both the culture of congestion as well as the concept of vertical condenser and, finally, Bigness. For instance, OMA’s proposal for Parc de la Villette in Paris (1982) follows somehow the same principles enunciated in the Downtown Athletic Club: rather than on a vertical process of layering, the project is based on a horizontal sequence of functional strips and single architectural elements that stand out for their autonomous character. If Manhattan’s skyscrapers introduced spatial discontinuity within the horizontal flow of the city, Parc de la Villette works, on the contrary, by continuity and fluidity in circulation. The project consists in ‘the superposition of four strategic layers for organizing different parts of the program: the “east-west strips” of varying synthetic and natural surfaces, the “confetti grid” of large and small service points and kiosks, the various “circulation paths,” and the “large objects,” such as the linear and round forests. The end result is a landscape of social instrument, where the quality of the project would derive from the uses, juxtapositions, and adjacency of alternating programs over time. Rather than a fixed design, the project offered the city a framework for developing flexible uses as needs and desires changed.’46 The competition for Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, won by OMA in 1989, is another unbuilt project that deserves attention. The key concept of this proposal is amalgam: a museum, a research center, a theater, conference halls, and labs are grouped in the same building.

Interface 43 In Koolhaas’ words, the building is supposed to generate density, exploit proximity, trigger tensions, and maximize frictions. The whole program is developed inside a single 43 × 43 × 58-meter prism. Each level accommodates a different activity but these are connected through technological devices. The outcome is an experiment where traditional as well as futuristic spatial solutions coexist by provoking mutual influences and hybrid conditions. To some extent, the Karlsruhe project can be considered as a prototype for a new type of multimedia space that will then proliferate in the following years. In the same decade, one of the first crystallizations of Bigness was Euralille, a 800,000-square meter container built over a 120-hectare area, whose main ambition was to transform the French city of Lille into the economic center of gravity of the triangle London-Brussels-Paris. Euralille depicted a microcosm of different activities: offices, parking areas, hotels, stores, and dwelling. All of these elements contribute to define a fluctuant typological condition that is local and global at the same time. In his theoretical and operative explorations, Koolhaas based the advent of Bigness on premises that were radical, provocative, and nihilist. One may say that Bigness’ ingredients – individualization of desires, programmatic instability, or formal indeterminacy – were not only anticipating current trends in architecture but, consciously or unconsciously, were also describing the success of the neo-liberal project. For this reason, Bigness has been variously interpreted and welcomed over the years. Some, like Rafael Moneo, even without expressing clearly their skepticism, questioned the real need for Bigness: ‘Are big buildings needed today? Who seeks big buildings? There are moments in which they may be necessary or even useful, but I would argue that they are mostly a symptom of late capitalism. Obviously, the economy – and the real world – have always exercised their influence over buildings and their construction, but today the size of buildings seems to be driven more by management decisions than by actual needs. Bigness also brings with it the corollary notion of the icon. At the extra-large scale, designs manifest a clear formal strategy, establishing above all what sort of icon the building will be. The phantom of arbitrariness appears once the iconic value overrides all other aspects of a building’s character.’47 Contrary to Moneo, William S. Saunders openly criticized the scope of Bigness, by addressing three concrete issues: first, Bigness can dominate new urban contexts like in China but Saunders doubted about their success in Western countries; second, Saunders was suspicious regarding the lack of identity Koolhaas deemed as liberating in Bigness. Rather than liberating, the risk for Saunders was that Bigness could just convert into a process of global homologation. Lastly, to quote Richard Ingersoll, ‘Bigness means surrender to bidness (Texan for business) more than, as Koolhaas says, surrender to technologies; to engineers, contractors, manufacturers;

44  Interface to politics; to others … a realignment with neutrality. Big bland structures communicate not neutrality, but indifference to anything but making money.’48 In reading Saunders’ words in retrospect, one may say that, deprived of a moralistic and pessimistic tone, his words have proved to be correct and wrong at the same time: the massive processes of globalization and financialization taking place on the world scale over the last 20 years have produced a massified syntax, as indeterminate and generic as the concept of Bigness Koolhaas had in mind. Yet, what Bigness generated is not necessarily individual freedom and unpredictable events, but very problematic relationships between public and private agents and, in some cases, forms of spatial segregation and inequalities. Whether Bigness accomplished its mission or revealed itself as one of the clearest manifestations of the gradual shift from welfare state to neo-liberal economies is still an open question. What is certain is that one of the axioms implicit in Bigness is also one of the contradistinguishing aspects of the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS: the liberation of the façade from its interiors. By analyzing Manhattan’s culture of congestion, Koolhaas comes to the conclusion that the façade is just an envelope, behind which different programs can overlap in mutual relationships of interdependence or autonomy. Interiors and exteriors therefore become two separate projects or, like in the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS, the exterior disappears in place of new urban interior media spaces: ‘places of space-time compression mapped in the network of larger global communication, marketing, and transportation flows. These internalized spaces have almost nothing to do with the traditional city, beside whose contextualized corpse they are sited.’49 Alejandro Zaera-Polo has been one of the first contemporary architects to explore and exploit the potential of this separation between exterior and interior, by focusing his attention on what he defined the politics of the envelope. In recognizing that the work of OMA identifies with a series of freedoms – ‘freedom from ties, freedom from structures, freedom from ideologies, freedom from models…always freedom’50 – Zaera-Polo adopts the architectural envelope as a stratagem to rethink architectural expression and the role of the architect in front of the current processes of global capitalism. As seen before, Douglas Spencer has often looked at his work not only to detect traces of what he called Deleuzism but also, more in general, to unveil the connection between supposed innovation and progressivism in architecture and neoliberalism. Zaera-Polo, in fact, urged the need for the architect to reposition themselves: ‘architects’ traditional role as visionaries (and ideologists) has become redundant as the sheer speed of change overtakes their capacity to represent politics ideologically. Visionary formulations pale in the face of reality’s complexity: an ideological position devoid of a close link to actualization and corporeality will remain disempowered.’51 Once acknowledged

Interface 45 that, Zaera-Polo suggests to produce an ‘updated politics of architecture in which the discipline is not merely reduced to a representation of ideal political concepts, but is conceived as an effective tool to produce change.’52 What this change is about, it is not totally clear. Zaera-Polo seems to suggest a post-critical approach, in which architecture is not entitled to reveal any struggle, antagonism, or anomaly: ‘it may be good to stop speaking of power in general, or of the state, capital, globalization, empire in general, and instead address specific ecologies of power comprising a heterogeneous mixture of bureaucracies – markets, shopping malls, residential towers, lifestyles, cladding systems, facade ratios, carbon emissions, etc.’53 Architecture, for Zaera-Polo, shouldn’t simply represent the interests of a client or of a certain political ideology, but should serve as an instrument of political agency that incorporates different instances. Zaera-Polo’s ambiguity also manifests itself in the idea that in order to confront power dynamics, architecture needs to develop strategies that allow for dialogue with power while at the same time challenging its structures. As we will see later, even the word politics, in Zaera-Polo’s both theoretical and professional work, is to some extent vague because it aligns to a mere individual dimension, as demonstrated by his emphasis on affect. However, if we keep following Zaera-Polo’s argument, we can say that in his view, the first step towards a new politics of architecture is to reconsider the role of the façade. For centuries, the building envelope has materialized the separation between inside and outside, natural and artificial, public and private. But the façade also served as a vehicle to convey identity, sense of belonging, and collective history. If the eighteenth century’s notion of architecture parlante relied on the idea that the exterior of the building should reflect the building’s purpose, the Modern movement viewed the envelope as the logical result of the form-function formula. Despite the proliferation of standardization, the idea of façade as an instrument of representation has continued to be important in the twentieth century, especially in the post-war debate – publications and conferences organized by CIAM, for example, have often addressed post-war reconstruction of urban areas by reflecting on the design of facades in civic buildings as emblem of collectivity. In recent years, Koolhaas’ concept of Bigness allowed Zaera-Polo and others to think of the envelope in new terms, as a suspended territory in search for new meaning: ‘the political performances of architecture have been historically attached to the plan or the section. The plan of the building organizes the power structure and protocols, while the section organizes the social strata and the building’s relationships with the ground. The envelope, on the other hand, has been relegated to a mere representational or symbolic function. The reasons for such a restricted political agency may lie in the understanding of the envelope as a surface, rather than as a complex assemblage of the materiality of the surface, technology, and its geometrical determinations.’54

46  Interface Today, Zaera-Polo is convinced that contemporary politics is demanding new forms of spatial and material organization that the façade can fully address. Recent developments in building technology, in fact, have liberated the architectural envelope from technical constraints – the use of pediments, cornices, and fenestration. Now that corners and windows are no longer technically necessary, and private and public are intertwined in hybrid configurations, the envelope can be a field where multiple ambitions blend. The architectural envelope can communicate with the external public realm, or also acting as a magnet for psychological, social, and cultural instances. Zaera-Polo sees the envelope as a ‘boundary that not only registers the pressure of the interior, but also resists it, transforming its energy into something else, and vice versa.’55 Envelopes for Zaera-Polo are political devices – other ambiguous definition – that regulate the flow of energy and matter in and out of the system: ‘if traditional politics is based on equilibrium and closed systems, the contemporary mechanisms of social and economic integration suggest that systems need to operate in an open mode. And, like in thermodynamics, equilibrium is only valid for closed systems where the overall amount of energy is kept constant. Once energy flows in and out of a system, the number and type of possible historical outcomes greatly increases.’56 In less specific terms, the problem of the envelope is articulated by David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi within the general relationship between expression and technology: ‘what is the relationship between an object originating in mass production and one intending aesthetic content? Is the cladding of a facade an outgrowth of its making, or is it something applied to the results of mere building? The subtle reciprocities and tensions between architectural figuration and rationalized industrial production have a decisive effect on architectural design and understanding.’57 In their conjectures, Leatherbarrow and Mostafavi recognize the direct dependence of construction on the means of production: ‘in current building, the factory floor, workshop bench, and assembly table in part substitute for the role of the construction site in traditional building; it is in the factory, or the assembly shop, that the parts that make up buildings are produced. The mass production of windows, doors, and all types of coverings has resulted in construction becoming assembly, thereby redefining construction.’58 To critically question the relationship between construction and representation via the design of facades, it is therefore necessary to recognize the possibilities offered by the market and their orientations. Zaera-Polo, on the contrary, is adopting a two-fold position: on the one hand, he relies on the complex organization of contemporary power structures to conceive an architecture that could dialogue with them. On the other hand, he is somehow convinced that innovation, experimentalism, and post-criticality can precede and orient the market. When it comes to the design of the envelope, examples of innovation and experimentalism are, for Zaera-Polo, mainly projects coming from the so-called star system:

Interface 47 Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Future Systems’ Selfridges Department Store in Birmingham (UK), OMA’s Seattle Public Library and Casa da Música in Porto, or Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada Tokyo. In all of these projects, architects not only play with smooth geometries, tessellation patterns, textures, and so on, but also rethink the notion of ornament by mixing expressive, technical, and performative requirements. In borrowing Deleuze’s words, Zaera-Polo recognizes in these projects the presence of a tendency ‘which resists coding, orientation, and other traditional forms of facialization, to engage in the production of new affects.’59 Affect becomes the ultimate goal of Zaera-Polo’s politics of the envelope: ‘the primary depository of contemporary architectural expression… an uncoded, pre-linguistic form of identity that transcends the propositional logic of more traditional political rhetoric. The material organization of the membrane has become not only a result of a technical articulation of building parts but an image of the engagement between the individual and the collective, and therefore a mechanism of political expression of contemporary societies.’60 While Zaera-Polo’s emphasis on the design possibilities offered by the envelope doesn’t really help describe the actual characteristics of the EXTERIORLESS, nor is indicating its future developments, his perspective is somehow relevant to our argument for different reasons. First of all, Zaera-Polo shares and takes to extreme consequences the separation between interior and exterior introduced by Koolhaas’ concept of Bigness. If Bigness signaled the transition of the architectural production toward giant, bland, and anonymous containers, Zaera-Polo acknowledges the divide between interior and exterior that Bigness provokes, by trying to work on the envelope as a sort of independent project. In the EXTERIORLESS, this separation between interior and exterior takes on a peculiar shape. While the EXTERIORLESS privileges structures in which horizontal dimensions are considerably larger than the vertical, exteriors are not concerned with representation or figuration – the exterior becomes mainly a problem of edges, frontiers, and boundaries: retail malls, warehouses, and factories are all primarily driven by the need to enclose a large area and therefore ‘tend to present a very low level of engagement with adjacent functions. These containers tend to avoid a strong interface with the outside, which is a source of pollution for the activities that take place inside them.’ 61 In the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS, interiors have to deal with circulation, ventilation, security, daylight, but don’t need exteriors to do that. They are able to manage artificially vast volumes of air, as well as to produce artificial environments through energy-intensive systems. Consequently, transparency is not needed. Second, as commented earlier, Zaera-Polo’s politics of the envelope is one of the many manifestations of the relationship between space and neoliberalism. His emphasis on smoothness, freedom from the past, and individual affect perfectly expresses the obsession for the ‘new’ that Douglas Spencer has widely described: ‘where the avant-garde of the

48  Interface early to mid-twentieth century premised its practice on the inseparability of the formal and the social, of the aesthetic and the political, the contemporary architect can content themselves with being recognized for the achievement of purely formal innovation, this now valued as the expression of individual freedom and deemed sufficiently radical as such.’62 Lastly, in his attention on the envelope, Zaera-Polo confirms what Koolhaas described via Bigness: city and architecture are almost two antithetical entities, if public or collective instances can be now only represented through a vertical plane of building facades. The EXTERIORLESS, as we will see in the following chapters, is completely disconnected from any traditional urban logic. Its ties with the public realm only occur through individual actions – movements, transactions, and purchases. The EXTERIORLESS denies the city and overcomes it with its multiple ramifications. What Koolhaas as well as Zaera-Polo write about large containers reverberates in some of the most significant examples of the EXTERIORLESS’ paradigm: among them are shopping malls and fulfillment centers. Structures that, to quote Jesse LeCavalier, are not only buildings: ‘more as an operating expense than as a capital investment, the buildings are deployed as a means to an end.’63 The end is profit. Through efficiency, smooth communication, and high-performance, the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS fulfills this demand. After analyzing the influence of Bigness and the envelope on the architecture of the EXTERIORLESS, in borrowing Lydia Kallipoliti’s words, one can say that the EXTERIORLESS is to some extent an architecture of unrootedness, ‘an insulated, closed world, disconnected from the exterior environment, an excerpt of Earth, neither receiving any input nor discharging output.’64 Yet, as we will see later, this is not entirely accurate: despite their appearance, the absence of the exterior, the disconnection from physical urban ties, etc., the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS are not closed worlds; they are the world – an intricate web of buildings, cities, port areas, extra-state zones that obey the logic of contemporary capitalism. Within this continuous and extended environment, ‘there is no hope of exteriority: in territories where everything is hyper-connected, not only architecture but also the subject becomes increasingly contained. Every echo becomes a world.’65

Notes 1. Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 46. 2. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1991). 3. See Gilles Deleuze, “Postscripts on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7. 4. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft. The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso Publishing, 2014), 18.

Interface 49 5. Ibid., 20. 6. Ibid., 467. 7. Bratton, The Stack, 5. 8. Ibid., 52. 9. Ibid., 67. 10. Ibid., 151. 11. Ibid., 158. 12. Ibid., 289. 13. Ibid., 179. 14. See Douglas Spencer, The Architecture of Neoliberalism. How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 15. Douglas Spencer, Critique of Architecture: Essays on Theory, Autonomy, and Political Economy (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2021), 31. 16. Ibid., 35. 17. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso Publishing, 2018). 18. Spencer, Critique of Architecture, 140. 19. Manuel Shvartzberg, “Foucault’s Environmental Power: Architecture and Neoliberal Subjectivization,” in The Architect as Worker. Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, ed. Peggy Deamer (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 184. 20. Craig Buckley, Graphic Assembly. Montage, Media, and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2019), 90. 21. Simon Sadler, Archigram. Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 20. 22. Buckley, Graphic Assembly, 59. 23. Paul Davies and Sean Griffiths, “Archigram: Experimental Architecture 196174,” AA Files, no. 28 (Autumn 1994): 73, https://www.jstor.org/stable/29543925. 24. Sadler, Archigram, 7. 25. Ibid., 47. 26. Ibid., 69. 27. Ibid., 194. 28. Marie Theres Stauffer, “Utopian Reflections, Reflected Utopias: Urban Designs by Archizoom and Superstudio,” AA Files, no. 47 (Summer 2002): 23, https:// www.jstor.org/stable/29544275. 29. Pier Vittorio Aureli, “More and More about Less and Less: Notes toward a History of Nonfigurative Architecture,” Log, no. 16 (Spring/Summer 2009): 14, http://www.jstor.com/stable/41765273. 30. Andrea Branzi, Weak and Diffuse Modernity. The Worlds of Projects at the Beginning of the 21st century (Milan: Skira, 2006), 70. 31. Victor Muñoz Sanz, “Main Supporting Characters,” in Steel Cities: The Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha, and Martin Špičák (Zurich: Park Books AG, 2019), 300. 32. Buckley, Graphic Assembly, 280. 33. Ibid. 34. Rem Koolhaas, “Introduction,” in Cedric Price. RE:CP, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2003), 7. 35. Buckley, Graphic Assembly, 170. 36. Thomas Fisher, “Labor and Talent in Architecture,” in The Architect as Worker. Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design, ed. Peggy Deamer (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 224.

50  Interface 37. Gabriele Mastrigli, “The Last Bastion of Architecture,” Log, no. 7 (Winter/ Spring 2006): 34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41765082. 38. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S,M,L,XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995), 514. 39. Ibid., 199. 40. William S. Saunders, “Rem Koolhaas’s Writing on Cities: Poetic Perception and Gnomic Fantasy,” Journal of Architectural Education 51, no. 1 (September 1997): 63, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1425523. 41. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), 10. 42. Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 340. 43. Ibid., 497. 44. See Federico Bilò, Bigness. Progetto e Complessità artificiale (Roma: Edizioni Kappa, 2004). 45. Koolhaas and Mau, S,M,L,XL, 511. 46. Alex Wall, “Programming the Urban Surface,” in Recovering Landscape. Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 237. 47. Rafael Moneo, “Seeking the Significance of Today’s Architecture,” Log, no. 44 (Fall 2018): 31, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26588503. 48. Saunders, “Rem Koolhaas’s Writing on Cities,” 67. 49. Grahame D. Shane, “OMA at MOMA” The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design Newsletter, May 1995, 3, in OMA/Rem Koolhaas. A Critical Reader, ed. Christophe Van Gerrewey (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2019). 50. Jeremy Till, “An Incomplete Encyclopedia,” Artifice, no. 4 (1996): 391, in OMA/Rem Koolhaas. A Critical Reader, ed. Christophe Van Gerrewey (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2019). 51. Alejandro Zaera-Polo, “The Politics of the Envelope,” Log, no. 13/14 (Fall 2008): 193, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41765249. 52. Ibid., 194. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 195. 55. Ibid., 196. 56. Ibid., 204. 57. David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 20. 58. Ibid., 28. 59. Zaera-Polo, “The Politics of the Envelope,” 201. 60. Ibid., 202. 61. Ibid., 99. 62. Spencer, Critique of Architecture, 144. 63. Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics. Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 104. 64. Lydia Kallipoliti, The Architecture of Closed Words. Or, What Is the Power of Shit? (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2018), 13. 65. Frederic Migayrou, “Extensions of the Oikos,” in Archilab’s Earth Buildings: Radical Experiments in Earth Architecture, eds. Marie-Ange Brayer and Beatrice Simonot (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 21–27.

3

Expanded Domains

If the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS manifest themselves first and foremost as an interface – platforms capable to guarantee efficiency, high-performance, and formal indifference – a second striking aspect defines the way those spaces function: it is their ubiquitous presence. This chapter explores the characteristic of the EXTERIORLESS to be isolated – often located in suburban or rural areas, disconnected from surrounding inputs – but at the same time deeply rooted in transnational networks, of which the EXTERIORLESS constitutes an essential component. Despite the apparent finiteness of their shapes, the spatial byproducts of contemporary capitalism act as expanded domains: their pervasiveness reaches beyond the physicality of their boundaries to constitute a diffuse geography that actually connects cities, regions, and continents of the globe. The following pages investigate two major ramifications through which the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS accomplish the mission to be at the same time local and global, punctual and ramified: as a byproduct of logistics, here intended in its complex apparatus of spaces, political decisions, and human labor; and as a byproduct of information technology, with a specific focus on the current processes of datafication.1 The purpose of this analysis is to reveal how space can describe power relations, entrench injustice, and employ technology to perpetuate pre-established dynamics. Logistics and data production/consumption are among the most recognizable manifestations of the current phase in capitalist development – their presence and relevance is constantly growing. They are also deeply interconnected; so does the articulated ensemble of spaces that they need for their functioning. The first category of spaces we will analyze is visible, just in front of us: it distinguishes itself for gigantic cranes and the automated systems allowing containers to move inside port terminals; for mountains of containers piled up in remote areas, waiting to be transported elsewhere; for miles of conveyor belts necessary to complete the inbound-outbound process in fulfillment centers. Over the years, the structuring of the world economy around just-in-time production, flexible labor arrangement, and global capital flow has determined very specific spatial translations; those spaces define a DOI: 10.4324/9781003251736-3

52  Expanded Domains territory which Charles Waldheim and Alan Berger have called landscape of logistics. 2 The landscape of logistics is constituted of interfaces that are generic, reproducible, efficient, and productive; they have made and are making globalization processes possible. However, in absolute terms, these byproducts are not something totally new: as we will see later, logistics has deep and consolidated roots in military history. Also, logistics activities can be read, to some extent, as a further evolution of the manufacturing world. To trace a history of logistics is, therefore, extremely pertinent because it allows to assess the material and environmental impact of its operations, as well as to detect the modes of governance that shape the actual organization of its spaces. Logistics, in other words, offers an instrument to comprehend the forces in action and to examine the transformation processes currently taking place in our cities. The expansion of logistics across the world has followed different curves: in some major European countries – France and Germany, for example – its development happened especially in industrial zones, as providers and shippers were originally looking for cheap land to build warehouses, and found available plots in those urban areas where manufacturing started to decline. Only after the 1990s logistics firms opted for more flexible models: rather than buy existing structures or build new ones, they simply decided to rent ready-to-use warehouses and to manage their facilities. Gradually, a new market in logistics real estate emerged, ‘dominated by international firms which specialize in logistics and manage global investment funds.’3 More recently, another shift happened: the industry leaders decided to develop large complexes containing multiple facilities – the so-called logistics parks. These parks are ‘fenced and protected by private security companies. Property management firms also provide services for the companies that rent the warehouses and their employees, such as canteens or even transport services.’4 Since these logistics parks are entirely private, real estate firms become the owners and the managers not only of the single buildings composing the park but also of the infrastructure and open areas that provide access to them or surround them. The tension between public and private interests, government control and multi-national corporation business models informs the EXTERIORLESS; it shapes its byproducts. Depending on the outcome of this tension, alternative futures can be imagined. Generally speaking, one might say that logistics produces a progressive privatization of the urban space, based on the implicit assumption that local political authorities accept the presence of multi-­national enterprises and often surrender to their power. Yet, in some cases, this process of privatization, along with the extreme conditions under which logistics workers undertake their tasks and more general environmental objections, has generated protests and strong resistance, which have translated in precise forms of political participation. If in Europe the development of logistics space can be partially associated with the decline of a certain manufacturing industry, what Charles

Expanded Domains 53 Waldheim and Alan Berger describe in their analysis of the North American context follows a different scheme. Waldheim and Berger, in fact, identify three emergent categories of logistics landscape: distribution and delivery, consumption and convenience, and accommodation and disposal. Distribution and delivery refer to the basic functions of supply chain – fundamental infrastructures such as roads, railways, ports, etc. Consumption and convenience represent ‘the easy abundance and cheap calories of strip retail urbanism and the fast-food culture it is organized to serve.’5 Here Waldheim and Berger refer to the proliferation of low-cost malls and fastfood chains such as Home Depot, Walmart, or McDonald’s, which are oftentimes strategically placed at the intersection of important transportation infrastructures. High-speed highways provide access for both goods and consumers. Lastly, accommodation and disposal have to do with the ‘staging, storage, and disposal of increasingly short-lived consumer goods.’6 Those goods are typically purchased in the same strip retail malls mentioned before – the final destination of inscrutable routes all around the globe. Their accumulation progressively makes necessary, especially in the U.S., the presence of other types of facilities: the self-storage. The landscape that Waldheim and Berger describe through these three categories is invasive: it is not only shaped by speculative capital but also by private interests and individual choices. It pervades all aspects of social and private life. Once exported outside of the American context, this same landscape overlaps with what the EXTERIORLESS represents in its architectures: a subliminal paraphernalia of spaces that triggers rituals and actions, affecting us both directly and indirectly. At the same time, this landscape of logistics and, more generally, the long-distance logistics chains operating nowadays globally, play a central role in supporting those processes that Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid have called planetary urbanization, in which ‘secured networks of flow enable the intensification of extended urbanism to ever more distant places and its scaling up into ever more vast transregional agglomerations.’7 Yet, the so-called landscape of logistics is only one side of the EXTERIORLESS as an expanded domain: its counterpart is supposedly intangible, apparently invisible, and has to do with the ever-increasing presence of data in our lives – ‘by 2018, we were creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, a sum that was increasing at such an exponential rate that 90% of the data in the world had been generated in only the two years prior.’8 Over the past 15 years, technical innovations in the possibility to collect, store, and analyze data have triggered a series of different phenomena. Local municipalities, for instance, began to partner with private tech-companies to analyze digital information related to the city and its inhabitants, in order to improve specific aspects of the urban life – the so-called rush for smart cities. Some cities like Rio de Janeiro ‘have built fusion centers, control rooms to coordinate and manage information across dozens of municipal departments – from traffic flow to emergency

54  Expanded Domains weather alerts.’ 9 At the same time, Police Departments and other institutions have turned data collection into systematic instruments of policing and repression. That is the case of the New York Police Department, and of their collaboration with Microsoft in order to set up a data analytics system called Domain Awareness System (DAS). In merging information from live camera feeds, 911 calls, cellular meta-data, social media feeds, and license-plate trackers, DAS produces heat maps of criminal activities: ‘based on meteorological images that use visual cues, like color, to map probable temperatures onto space, these heat maps are organized taxonomically, spatially, and chronologically. That is, the maps predict (1) the type of criminal activity likely to occur, (2) the space in which the criminal event is likely to unfold, and (3) the timing of the event.’10 Therefore, DAS not only gives a private actor – Microsoft – the power to collect and archive the digital information generated by citizens but also reinvigorates the idea that the urban space is the laboratory for governance par excellence – the locus where strategies and tactics of governance take place. As pointed out by R. Josh Scannell, DAS implies that ‘crime is mathematizable – it is a sort of natural phenomenon, like weather, that can be neutrally predicted and anticipated. This approach occludes not only the social construction of crime statistics but also the social construction of crime and the urban.’11 To talk about data, therefore, also means bringing to light the critical role played by non-state actors whose influence is progressively neutralizing public authorities – see Google, and other tech-companies such as Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, or Dropbox. Amazon, in particular, has pioneered the mass collection of consumer data, by gathering customers’ information in order to predict, suggest purchases, and market other possible items. Progressively, Amazon’s ultimate goal is becoming to outline, via data collection, a model in which production, distribution, and sale are perfectly integrated. With this objective in mind, over time Amazon has shaped its own facilities – see Amazon Web Services (AWS), founded in 2003. AWS provide not only artificial intelligence (AI) for in-house applications, such as voice assistants or automated computing infrastructure, but also cloud services for other business customers, such as Capital One, News Corp, Verizon, Airbnb, Slack, Coca-Cola, and even direct rivals like Apple and Netflix, while bringing in more than $17 billion in revenue for the year 2017.12 Surprisingly, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which is reported to have a ‘$600 million contract with AWS,’ is one of those clients.13 Another similar collaboration between governmental authorities and private tech-companies concerns Microsoft and the bid for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) for the U.S. military. Potentially a $10 billion contract, Microsoft won the tender over Amazon, by promising to provide a cloud infrastructure capable to improve communications with soldiers on the battlefield, as well as to use AI to optimize war planning strategies. In 2021, after the contract stayed on hold due to political

Expanded Domains 55 controversies, President Joe Biden announced a new cloud initiative that would replace the JEDI project. Again, in surveillance capitalism, private and public interests are dramatically interconnected, with one actor – the private – not only supporting but also gradually acquiring imposing influence on the other. In order to extend their hegemony, Amazon and other tech-companies have necessitated physical infrastructures. If data, in fact, are by definition invisible, their production and consumption are dramatically concrete: data themselves are a medium that require storage and, above all, a massive consumption of electricity – according to a Greenpeace report on cloud computing and climate change, ‘the electricity consumed by cloud computing globally increased from 632 billion kilowatt-hours in 2007 to 1,963 billion kilowatt-hours in 2020. If imagined as an emergent nation-state, the Cloud would be today the fifth large consumer of electricity, ahead of India, Canada, France, Brazil, and the United Kingdom.’14 Typically, data are stored in structures that neglect the exterior, built away from areas potentially subject to natural disasters, in proximity of cheap energy sources, and favorable land use zoning. Data centers don’t necessarily contemplate the human presence. What they really demand is power and water: power to run the machines, water to cool them down. Contrary to the typical spatialities of logistics, data centers and other similar byproducts are often situated in unexpected locations – underground bunkers, coal mines, former military structures, and old churches – and declare their extreme interiorization in name of safety, security, or national interests. They are designed as sensitive facilities and protected as such: ‘their walls were twice as thick as those of most buildings, able to withstand winds of up to 150 miles per hour. Their concrete floor slabs could hold up to 350 pounds per square foot.’15 That is the case of Walmart’s data center in McDonald County, Missouri, described by Jesse LeCavalier as a camouflaged fortification, ‘built to disappear. Buried in the ground and hidden from view, the highly secured building is more legible as a node in a network of transmission than as a physical building. Its location, form, program, and use all present a version of architecture characterized and determined by its crucial role in the logistical system. As an automated structure that serves primarily as a relay station, it makes few provisions for its human occupants. Its design is aimed at optimization and the seamless merging of building, infrastructure, and information.’16 This chapter will investigate data centers and other similar spaces as epitomes of the EXTERIORLESS and, at large, as necessary byproducts of capitalism’s current phase. We will analyze the spatialities of logistics and data in their interdependence, yet distinguishing among the different formal, conceptual, and ideological vectors that drive their design. The result will be a journey across different regions of the world through fulfillment centers, port areas, and data centers, aimed at documenting the expanded ambivalence of the EXTERIORLESS.

56  Expanded Domains

Figure 3.1  Umm Qasr, Basra, Iraq. Satellite view Courtesy: © Google Earth

Figure 3.2  Niccolò Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra (The Art of War), 1519-1520.

Expanded Domains 57

The Empire of Logistics On December 31, 2010, a public ceremony took place in Umm Qasr, Southern Iraq. The country’s only deepwater port, 50 kilometers away from the city of Basra and 500 kilometers from the capital Baghdad, Umm Qasr has been for centuries an important trade and naval base for the region, representing Iraq’s connection to the Persian Gulf. Most importantly, Umm Qasr’s name is sadly associated to Camp Bucca, one of the major detention camps built by the U.S. during the Iraq occupation (2003) on the site of a former military camp established by the British Army in the second decade of the nineteenth century. More than 20,000 detainees were held in this camp during the time it was active, surveilled by personnel that was later involved in Abu Ghraib’s cases of torture and abuses. On the day of the ceremony, the Iraqi flag was raised in place of the American flag, to symbolize the return of the 740-acre (300 ha) Camp Bucca area to the Iraqi community.17 Camp Bucca could now become Basra Logistics City, a facility able to provide storage, goods transportation, tracking, cargo handling, and to process oil for multinational companies – Basra, in fact, sits above huge wealth: ‘oil production is projected to increase faster in Iraq than in any other country in the world over the next 25 years, by reaching the amount of more than eight million barrels per day by 2035.’18 After Camp Bucca was handed back by the Americans to the Iraqi Government, local company Kufan Group, in collaboration with the New York-based company Northern Gulf Partners, was granted in a tender a 40-year lease of the site. Despite the triumphalist tones expressed during the ceremony, the Americans kept exerting their influence on the area by other means: all the foreign investors in Basra Logistics City were exempted from corporate taxes for 10–15 years, and they were entitled to employ entirely foreign work force by also holding the right to repatriate all investment and profit.19 Starting from 2012, new constructions in the area have been slowly transforming its image from a military structure to a logistics site. To date, the most visible trace of this transformation is the Basra Gateway Terminal (BGT), a multi-purpose cargo handling facility composed of several berths, storage areas, internal roads, and oil and gas area.20 Deborah Cowen observed that it is not despite its military past that Camp Bucca was so well suited to become a logistics city but because of it. 21 The military organization of the area, in fact, served as an ideal starting point to build a logistics center that could be physically safe, constantly surveilled by guards, and isolated by the turbulent urban settlement of Basra. More generally, the same companies involved in building logistics are typically also those responsible for major contracts with the military. This is to say that logistics obeys similar rules as warfare; that logistics requires competences and know-how that can be mostly found in the military field but that, above all, the origin of logistics itself as an autonomous science is rooted in the experience of war.

58  Expanded Domains While logistics was an essential part of warfare since long time – the Roman Empire was able to conquer and consolidate its hegemony over a large territory mainly because of their military culture, and specifically because of the possibility to move and provide armies at long distance – logistics as we know it today begins to take its shape only in modern era. As pointed out by Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia Frapporti,22 the roots of logistics can be identified in three distinct moments. The first one derives from war planning and, more specifically, from the paradigm shift happening in warfare between sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the increasing number of soldiers employed in military campaigns required new organizational structures.23 The second aspect behind the rise of logistics has to do with broad geo-­political conditions which threatened the stability of European states both internally – social conflicts – and externally – the systematic expansion beyond their borders through the Atlantic Ocean. From this perspective, logistics arises as a response to the discovery of new spaces to be occupied rationally and orderly and becomes also an instrument of governance. As a consequence of the first two aspects, the last component shaping the development of logistics has to do with the slave trade across the Atlantic, which required a systemic deployment of men and resources and constituted the first major mass movement of ‘goods’ in history, where humans were sadly traded and exchanged as goods. The centrality gained by logistics operations in warfare grew progressively throughout the following centuries: for instance, logistics became one of three pillars in Napoleonic warfare along with the arts of strategy and tactics. In emerging as an essential component of any military initiative, some of the principles and techniques implicit in logistics were naturally transferred to other territories, especially after World War II. One of those techniques has to do with supply: starting from the late 1950s, in fact, the number of mobility studies increased within and outside of the military world. Departments of Defense, especially in the U.S., produced a series of strategic documents aimed to assess the possibility to move forces quickly while maintaining the capability for large reinforcements; the academic world too experienced a steady addition of writing in logistics-physical distribution; and American business went through literally a revolution in the organization and methods used to move goods.24 As logistics’ primary premise, mobility became a critical issue: the success of a military campaign as well as of a trade-driven business depended on the efficiency of the mobility strategies implemented. Soldiers, weapons, and goods could be equated: shortfalls in transportation architecture generated problems in warfare as well as in commerce. Gradually, one may say that logistics abandoned its military boundaries to became a global business science. In this respect, the founding of the Logistics Management Institute (LMI) in 1961 represented the milestone in business logistics; companies realized that good integrated logistics could offer competitive advantage and hegemonic market positions. Globalization has accelerated today’s fundamental role of logistics in trade: the United

Expanded Domains 59 Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reports that ‘in 2006 world shipping constituted 90% of global trade volume.’25 Nevertheless, logistics remains an art of war, although the boundaries between the military and the civilian are somehow blurred, difficult to separate. If its use was originally motivated by the need to combat mostly external enemies, today battlefields have been internalized; ‘the deployment of troops has been replaced by the transnational migration of the labor force, the microdisciplinary techniques of control, and the management of information. Military camps have been transformed into dormitories, free-trade zones, and centers for detaining, expelling, and redistributing migrants.’26 In other words, one might say that logistics is not much about the militarization of trade but about a more complicated coproduction of corporate and military calculation and space.27 To venture through the variegated landscape of logistics means intercepting a series of spaces – from small modular units to urban fragments – that, despite their adherence to one overarching logic, have their own formal and organizational specificity. Port areas, warehouses, fulfillment centers, distribution centers, highways, and railways: in their diversity, all of these spaces serve the same purpose – to guarantee a disruption-free service and to permit gaining strategic market positions through intensification (in circulation of commodities) and reduction (in distribution time). Logistics – that is, its spatial byproducts – makes production, distribution, and consumption smoother. The following pages examine logistics across two parallel levels: first, as a sequence of different fundamental moments characterizing the supply chain – production of goods, arrival of goods into port areas, distribution through local hubs, and delivery to customers’ homes. Second, in relation to specific spatial elements that make logistics possible: the shipping container – the modular unit from which it started all; the warehouse, in its original and contemporary versions; and, in the next chapter, the so-called logistics parks.

60  Expanded Domains

Figure 3.3 Stefano Corbo, The Empire of Logistics. Courtesy: © Stefano Corbo, 2022

Figure 3.4  Global Marine Traffic, Accessed May 25, 2022. Courtesy: © MarineTraffic (www.marinetraffic.com)

Expanded Domains 61

Figure 3.5  APM Terminal, Prinses Amaliahaven, 2019. Maasvlakte 2, Port of Rotterdam. Courtesy: © Kees Torn

Figure 3.6  Amazon España, Logistics Center, San Fernando de Henares. Courtesy: © Álvaro Ibáñez

62  Expanded Domains Trade is now essentially global: ships full of raw commodities arrive in ports – typically Chinese ports – and then leave with manufactured goods in all directions, especially Western countries. The oil that fuels those ships comes primarily from the Arabian Peninsula. As commented by Laleh Khalili, ‘sea routes are constantly reimagined to accommodate geopolitical realignments, corporate alliances, and shifting calculations about ship sizes, route expediencies, and maritime power plays.’28 Trade wouldn’t have become really global without a series of spaces specifically designed to allow for transportation, storage, and distribution. But, most importantly, trade wouldn’t have become really global without the introduction of one specific universal element: the shipping container. Since its first appearance in 1956, when a first prototype called Ideal-X sailed from Newark, New Jersey, in direction of Houston, the container made transporting goods inexpensive and, above all, represented a radical turn in trade that paved the way for the definition of a real global market, in which ‘a 25-ton container of coffeemakers can leave a factory in Malaysia, be loaded aboard a ship, and cover the 9,000 miles to Los Angeles in 23 days. A day later, the container is on a unit train to Chicago, where it is transferred immediately to a truck headed for Cincinnati. The 11,000-mile trip from the factory gate to the Ohio warehouse can take as little as 28 days, a rate of 400 miles per day, at a cost lower than that of a single business-class airline ticket.’29 What today appears as a simple metal box is in reality the product of naïve intuitions, technological innovations, and political negotiations. The idea of shipping freight in boxes had been in fact around for many years; since the late nineteenth century, for example, both in France and England, railways used to adopt wooden containers to move objects. Other countries, instead, replaced railways with another system, the truck, which had clear advantages for shorter hauls, despite the inconvenience of primitive infrastructures. In the U.S., starting from 1929, a steamship operator, Seatrain Lines, had used ad hoc built ships holding railway boxcars in metal cells. But metal boxes were also used in warfare: after World War II, the U.S. military began to use small steel containers, called Conex boxes, for soldiers’ personal belongings. Initially, therefore, the word container described a very diverse range of solutions, depending on the geographic context where those were implemented. Also, some containers were designed to be shifted by cranes, and others to move thanks to forklifts. Different models and types of container entered the market: ‘the Marine Steel Corporation, a New York manufacturer, advertised no fewer than 30 different models, from a 15-foot-long steel box with doors on the side to a steel-frame container with plywood sides, 4½ feet wide, made to ship “five-and-dime” merchandise to Central America.’30 Despite these historical precedents, for a long time many saw in Malcolm Purcell McLean – a trucking magnate – the inventor of the shipping container in the forms we currently know it, especially for his crucial role in

Expanded Domains 63 boosting and reshaping the business of shipping. Historians today agree to downplay McLean’s achievements because his container was an updated version of transportation modalities already existing, as we have seen, since at least decades before. What is certain is that McLean was able to intercept the widespread demand for safer, cheaper transport as well as lower insurance, which was coming from shippers, ship owners, and truckers. Most importantly, in taking advantage of the 1950s regulations, McLean used the container as a means to achieve a broader goal: his intuition was that ‘the shipping industry’s business was moving cargo, not sailing ships. That insight led him to a concept of containerization quite different from anything that had come before. McLean understood that reducing the cost of shipping goods required not just a metal box but an entire new way of handling freight. Every part of the system – ports, ships, cranes, storage facilities, trucks, trains, and the operations of the shippers themselves – would have to change.’31 In outlining his plan, McLean relied on the expertise of Keith Tantlinger, a mechanical engineer who, already in 1949, had ideated the prototype for a modern shipping container – a 30-foot aluminum box that could be stacked, placed on a chassis, and pulled by a truck. More specifically, Tantlinger’s innovation was the so-called twistlock – a lock placed at the corners of the containers so that they could be connected to one another and transported easily via cranes. The U.S. war in Vietnam, where more than 500,000 soldiers, sailors, and marines needed to be provided with supplies, offered McLean the first possibility to apply his ideas concretely and to develop containerization on a large scale. SeaLand, the company he founded, was in fact able to deliver more than 1,000 containers every month to Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, supporting the U.S. military campaign. Out of the military context, containers helped reduce freight bills and, also, helped save time. Transition from manufacturer to customer shortened drastically and containers, along with other innovative solutions, contributed to fuel the ‘just-in-time’ logic that saw companies like Toyota or Honda to produce goods only when the customer needed them, abandoning the idea of inventories or huge storage. Yet, the definition of a container-based global trade passed through standardization: after discussions, negotiations, and different proposals, in 1959 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) agreed to study containers. In 1964, 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-foot containers were formally adopted as ISO standards. In 1968, the ISO finally implemented the standard ISO 668, which classified freight shipping containers based on size, measurements, and weight. Today, containers, stacked one on top of the other and organized along extended rows, shape the landscape of many cities around the globe. One may say that container terminals have become an appendix of the city, where social and political dynamics are reproduced on a different scale. Or, as epitomes of the EXTERIORLESS, one may say that container terminals

64  Expanded Domains are interfaces characterized by the combination of different spaces: berths accommodating large vessels which only carry containers; 200-feet (60 m.) high steel cranes, which rest on rails and help unload the ships – each crane can move 30 or 40 boxes per hour from ship to dock; storage yards, where containers are temporary stationed; railroads, used by trucks to transport containers out of the terminals. These spaces, and the functions associated to them, generate a series of actions that identically repeat throughout the day and that are continuously optimized through new technologies and new planning efforts. Humanmachine interactions progressively change; new labor conditions arise, so do new problems. Computers determine the order in which containers can be discharged, and manage the traffic flow inside the terminal. The progressive transition toward total automation becomes a threat for the workers currently operating in those sectors. In Bayonne, New Jersey, for example, the official slogan of the local container terminal is ‘When Tomorrow arrives Today.’32 Very close to Manhattan, the terminal is a semi-automated cargo-processing space, where human active presence is not totally necessary. In this 67-hectare area, in fact, human supervision is only required in exceptional cases, mostly when cranes and cargo containers enter in contact: ‘these moments of human-assisted control lasted no more than 10 seconds, after which the terminal’s human operators were free to go back to whatever they had been doing previously.’33 The acceleration process toward automation also characterizes other port areas such as Rotterdam, home to a very technologically advanced container terminal: its name is Maasvlakte 2. Officially opened in 2013, this 2.6-billion Euros operation is the latest extension in the port of Rotterdam, and is more than 2,000 hectares vast. The area was specifically designed to allow passage and docking of ultra large container ships (ULCS), and it employs ship-to-shore (STS) cranes that are almost as high as the Erasmus Bridge.34 Most importantly, Maasvlakte 2 has been conceived since its beginning to be a completely automated terminal, a continuation of the neighboring Maasvlakte – a terminal which introduced Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) in 1993. While Maasvlakte didn’t achieve fully automation because cranes required the presence of operators on board, Maasvlakte 2 is described as the last and ultimate step toward terminals’ automation. In Maasvlakte 2, no manual control is needed: optical character recognition (OCR), on-board cameras, and other stratagems help identify objects, move goods faster, and optimize loading-unloading time. Furthermore, ‘additional software translates the commands of the TOS (Terminal Operating System) into specific movements and driving paths that are then sent to the robotic equipment.’35 Cranes place containers on automated guided vehicles, which transport them toward the storage yards. When their battery is low, these vehicles will drive to a charging station. This automated process deploys new organizational models of labor but doesn’t resolve the

Expanded Domains 65 perennial conflict between humans and machines. Strikes at the Port of Rotterdam against automation have in fact characterized the last years – see the 24-hour strike in 201636 – in which unions expressed their concern about jobs being eliminated after automated container terminals became fully operational. Despite its location in the heart of Europe, part of the terminals at Maasvlakte – Maasvlakte 1, not its recent addition – is today owned by the Hong Kong-based port operator Hutchison, who acquired the area previously controlled by the Danish giant AP Møller-Maersk in 2019. Sea trade is therefore intrinsically global: actors from different areas of the world have taken the lead in shipping, distributing, and providing freight-related services: ‘of the twenty ports handling the greatest number of containers in 2014, eleven had seen little or no container traffic in 1990, and several had not functioned as ports at all. As late as 2000, Hong Kong served almost all of China’s international trade, as there were no large container terminals on the Chinese mainland. By 2014, seven of the world’s ten largest terminals were in China and in the Middle East.’37 As pointed out by Deborah Cowen, China might be better considered not the factory of the world, but a logistics empire – China has the largest container and crane manufacturers, is now the third-largest ship-owning country and the second-largest shipbuilding country after Japan.38 Overall, logistics can play a major role in fostering national economies, as the case of Dubai can testify. Dubai, in fact, not only invented the first form of logistics city, as we will see in the following chapter, but has also set up peculiar strategies of governance related to logistics, which concern security, labor, and citizenship. Dubai is currently one of the most important ports in the world, acting as a distribution point for the U.A.E. as well as for the Arabian Peninsula, and even beyond – for countries like Iran, Pakistan, or those in East Africa. Not to mention the geo-political support it receives from some Western countries – since its colonial occupation, in fact, the British regarded Dubai as a strategic transit port. Initially, several circumstances didn’t play at Dubai’s favor: its location inside the entrance to the Persian Gulf, which forces vessels from China heading to the Suez Canal to diverge from its ports; the absence of natural harbor; a small local population; a fierce competition in the area for cargo. Nevertheless, since 1904, when it was designated free port, Dubai has known different phases of expansion that led to its current shape. Over the years, the construction of several port areas took place: from Port Rashid, which opened in 1971 and resulted to be immediately incapable to meet the demands of the region, to Jebel Ali, whose construction started in 1976, 45 kilometers away from Port Rashid. Jebel Ali was built very quickly and its facilities were managed by Malcolm McLean’s company, SeaLand. To some extent, Jebel Ali became one of the symbols of globalization: out of 720 companies operating in the port in 1995, only 2.5% were Emirati. 39

66  Expanded Domains In addition to that, Jebel Ali was not simply a place of commerce: its free zone also hosted U.S. military material. In 1991, SeaLand was replaced by the Dubai Port Authority, which began managing Port Rashid as well. The last stage of Dubai’s port definition was in 2005, when Dubai Ports World was formed. Dubai Ports World is today a global player, it operates 78 terminals worldwide and is currently aiming at acquiring ports in the Indian Ocean basin: it signed contracts for a 30-year concession for the port of Doraleh in Djibouti (2006) and a 25-year concession in Aden (2008), as well as contracts to operate container terminals in Karachi, Pakistan, and Mumbai and Kochi in India.40 In 2006, in its desire of expansion, Dubai Ports World participated in a controversial and unsuccessful bid for the management of six U.S. ports, which revealed the interconnected and networked nature of global capitalism. Parallel to the foundation of Dubai Ports World is the opening in 2007 of Dubai Logistics City, a large integrated interface conceived to manage and move goods globally – a response to the need of the Emirati economy to diversify its oil-based economy, and to reposition itself onto a larger geo-political scenario. While containers revolutionized global shipping, warehouses – whose origin is not directly connected to logistics – are nowadays an essential component of the supply chain when it comes to storage and distribution. We tend to describe warehouses as spaces of transmission, not of transformation – goods exit warehouses in the same state they enter them, this is why we can’t compare warehouses with factories. Yet, in a ‘just-in-time’ logic that attempts to reduce the space and time between production and consumption, warehouses don’t imply only storage but also trade and profit – storing for the purpose of commercial gain. Warehouses are spaces of capital, ‘hidden in plain sight, present but absent – out of stock.’41 That has not always been the case. If we look at the diffusion of warehouses in the U.S. after the Civil War, for example, we can realize how the term warehouse took on, at least in the beginning, a double connotation: as a depository, a place aimed to preserve and safeguard goods; and as a depot, a place where goods were temporarily sheltered before being transferred elsewhere.42 Today, warehouses evolved into different names, sizes, and shapes. What they share is their bond to fulfillment, a keyword for logistics. Empires such as Amazon or Walmart utilize warehouses as part of their business by employing numerous distinct names to describe them: supercenters, fulfillment centers, distribution centers, etc. Generally, these spaces are complex apparatuses in which skids, lowerators, conveyors, lift trucks, and other machines support the smoothness of transmission required by global trade. Their architecture is generic, a horizontal floor of information characterized by the separation between few stable organizational entities and the ever-moving presence of goods that are transferred and sequenced according to specific demands. Similar to what described earlier for the ISO

Expanded Domains 67 containers’ case, warehouses have their forms of standardization required by logistics: one of them is the international-standard Class A. Generally located at the confluence of strategic infrastructures such as airports, railways, ports, or highways, international-standard Class A warehouses are assembled on site through manuals; they are based on different components, and on a construction module which derives by the dimensions of the ISO container. Typically, these spaces are organized according to a 12 × 24 meter structural grid, with a height of 12 meters – a figure determined by the maximum possible load on the floor and the usual height of the racks (10 meters).43 The facades of Class A warehouses are made out of sandwich panels, whose application has no expressive or aesthetic value but only performative: sandwich panels – formed by two metal panels separated by insulating layer – only have to provide sufficient fire resistance and to satisfy heat-insulating parameters. Each panel is around 6 meters long, a dimension which is also linked to the length and width of the 20-foot container. In a Class A warehouse, the most important element is the floor, a concrete slab which has to have a load-bearing capacity usually 5 tons per square meter and whose surface must show only minimal wear in the long term. For this reason, the floor is actually composed of a resistant top layer, which can be made of steel, plastic, or glass fiber. To assemble a Class A warehouse, three major tools are necessary: ‘lifting suction cups and clamps for manipulation of the panel, an electric screwdriver with a maximum rotating speed of 3,000 revolutions per minute for fixing the panel to the frame, and a machine saw with steel cutters for the potential modification of standardized parts and removing casting flash.’44 The overall construction of these warehouses aligns perfectly with the space-time compression required by logistics: between four and six months on average. In other words, Class A warehouses are economically advantageous: if in the past logistics companies had to buy and repurpose existing structures according to their needs, today Class A warehouses allow logistics to meet standards, certification criteria, and performance parameters at lower costs. However, despite their basic configuration, Class A warehouses are something more than simple structures. They are paradigmatic manifestations of the EXTERIORLESS: while their physical isolation and generic formal attributes outline a presumed indifference to the context they operate in, as well as a disconnection from urban fabrics, their life and their functioning is always site-specific, because their interior organization is determined by ‘particular trends in consumer desires, market demands, local productive networks, and working relations.’45 If we pay attention to the general phenomenon of fulfillment, we can recognize different strategies and organizational models whose scope is broader than that of a single warehouse. Walmart, for example, is an American multinational corporation with more than 4,000 locations in the U.S. and 6,000 international stores. Rather than being considered a retail

68  Expanded Domains company, Walmart can be better described as a logistics company, given the size and the impact of its operations. In his The Rule of Logistics, Jesse LeCavalier has dissected Walmart’s ecosphere by detecting three major elements that support its ambitions: the supercenter, the data center, and the distribution center.46 These structures are not called buildings, but formats or prototypes: while formats represent a more general category and depict the kind of store, prototypes are different variations of given formats. Supercenters are retail stores open to the public – a combination of merchandise store and large discount food store – arranged according to a park-and-shop dynamic: building and parking lots constitute a spatial unicum, which repeats with small variations at any location. Supercenters are defined by LeCavalier examples of content without form: the building is defined by a ‘strict set of protocols that pertain to inventory management, but it is ringed by a loosely formed band of ancillary programs like inventory storage, rentable space, and other service functions.’47 The company controls the interior layout of the stores, while the exterior can be subject to adjustments upon request of local authorities or communities. The second element constituting the trilogy of Walmart spaces are the data centers, which LeCavalier considers as examples of form without content. While content is intangible, and the interiors of data centers are constantly updated as new technologies are employed, the structure that host them has to be somehow rigid, meeting some specific requirements especially in terms of cooling and ventilation. Lastly, the distribution centers in Walmart’s strategy are examples of equivalence between form and content: in these semi-automated spaces that on average contain inventory for no more than 24 hours, the envelope adapts completely to the interior content of the building, as it exists to protect and secure the process happening inside. Goods move constantly, monitored by employees wearing earpieces and scanners which are connected to central computers in Bentonville, Arkansas – Walmart’s headquarters. Physically disconnected from the surroundings, distribution centers are expanded interiors, in which the continuous movement of goods through conveyors belts creates an ever-changing landscape. Similar to the EXTERIORLESS, the interior of distribution centers is the world: a universe of trailers, belts, and racks that exemplifies the essence of globalization. Despite their differences, all three byproducts described by LeCavalier are spaces of the EXTERIORLESS: horizontal layout always prevails over vertical extension; notions of expressivity or symbolism are discarded at the root – Walmart needs interfaces for larger systems; interior organization depends on performance, space-time optimization, and reproducibility in its genericness. After embracing Walmart’s initial innovations in the sector of logistics – especially the key idea that goods have to move and not be stored – Amazon has progressively developed a divergent model, by becoming one of the

Expanded Domains 69 largest logistics companies in the world. Its physical footprint is constantly growing – it increased 42% in 2017 to 24 million square meters.48 Amazon’s universe is structured across the combination of different elements: sortation centers, Amazon Flex centers, Amazon Web services, local delivery services such as United Parcel Service (UPS), temporarily contracted drivers, and many others. In total, as of mid-2019, Amazon had more than 1,000 global facilities. Looking only at its U.S. operations, ‘Amazon had 10 inbound sortation centers, 166 fulfillment and return centers, 47 outbound sortation centers, 53 Prime Now hubs, 12 Whole Foods distribution centers, 21 Pantry Fresh Food fulfillment centers, 162 delivery stations, and 6 airport hubs.’49 To claim their infrastructural character, Amazon’s fulfillment centers are named after airports, based on their proximity to them. In addition to warehousing, distribution, and fulfillment services, Amazon has also developed its own delivery system – the so-called last mile. Rather than building its last mile infrastructure in-house, Amazon decided to rely on a fleet of temporary subcontracted workers: Amazon Flex drivers and Amazon Delivery Service Partners (DSPs). While in most countries Amazon still relies on local postal services and private delivery companies, some of its services are performed by workers who are typically paid per completion of a delivery route, and use their own personal vehicles. The decision to deliver its packages through third-party workers can be partially explained through Amazon’s desire to reduce its dependence from unionized firms such as UPS and United States Postal Service (USPS). All across the country, Amazon’s decision has amplified the racialization of labor, eroded labor standards, weakened the power of existing unions, and also favored the implementation of new surveillance modalities based on real-time technologies.50 Despite setting up a model of labor organization which mixes meritocracy, game theory, and diversity discourse, Amazon still follows what Francesco Massimo calls the three pillars of Taylorism:51 dissociation of the labor process from the skills of the workers – Amazon often recruits people without any professional background or related work experience; separation of conception from execution – the labor process is purposely fragmented into basic tasks that workers are simply asked to execute; monopoly over knowledge to control each step of the labor process – Amazon’s management is aware that even the most basic tasks imply some form of mental activity, and therefore the use of digital devices allows real-time control of those tasks. Through the implementation of these principles, Amazon accomplishes its intents: to govern not only the flow of goods but also labor conditions in its facilities.

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Figure 3.7 ANNEX, Entanglement, Irish Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021. Courtesy: © Stefano Corbo

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Figure 3.8 Stefano Corbo, Life and Death in the EXTERIORLESS III, 2022. Courtesy: © Stefano Corbo

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The Cloud Is Material At the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale (2021), a post-industrial campfire was erected in the middle of the Irish Pavilion, hosting an exhibition titled Entanglement. Hanging from this metal structure were cables, screens, speakers, cameras, fans, and lights. Visitors could walk around, read texts, and watch images. In representing a country that hosts 25% of all available European server space52 – major hub for the headquarters of multinational corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft – and where data infrastructure is expected, by the year 2027, to consume a third of the whole country’s electricity, Entanglement explored the materiality of data and its impact on everyday life. Curated by ANNEX, a multidisciplinary research and design collective, Entanglement aimed to remind us that ‘the production and dissemination of data is also the production and dissemination of heat. The regulation of heat becomes material in the form of the data center, the server-rack, the motherboard. Airflow and heat regulation become technically featured in the structures that facilitate the immaterial. Therefore, heat proves the immaterial is also material and distributed in space. Heat speaks to a material primitiveness about something often misconceived as “virtual” or taking place in a cloud.’53 Entanglement’s campfire structure, therefore, is a metaphor that evokes the socializing and centralizing aspect of fire – the originating nucleus of any primitive hut around which social interactions take place. At the same time, in raising awareness about the material footprint of the global internet and cloud services, Entanglement also employs the campfire to describe its contemporary version – a space where information is stored: the data center. Currently responsible for about 3% of global electricity consumption and for the 2% of global carbon emissions, data centers are proliferating very quickly all around the world: estimates suggest that by 2017, there were more than 8.6 million data centers of various types around the world.54 Similar to fulfillment centers, data centers are interfaces that are part of extensive networks. Their functioning depends on a strict series of parameters. First of all, data centers have to be flexible, in the sense that they have to support new applications, services, and technologies without major compatibility issues. The buildings hosting data centers may expand in the future, which means that their design needs to embrace potential transformations. The second essential property for a successful data center is its availability: data centers should always be running, maintaining high service level and avoiding any unplanned failures or disruption. The third property is scalability: variations in data volume must not affect the overall service offered by data centers. Another essential feature of data centers is security: data centers are often inaccessible and secret, because their activities need to be protected from any potential threat – whether it is a physical threat or one related to cybercrime. The majority of the data centers available today are accommodated in buildings that have not been

Expanded Domains 73 originally designed for the purpose of data storage, but that have been reconverted in recent times to this new use. If data centers may typically accommodate hundreds of physicals servers, their recent evolution – the hyperscale data centers – can accommodate thousands of physical servers and millions of virtual machines, distributed over surfaces larger than 10,000 square meters: one of the latest Amazon facilities in Dublin, for example, will be around 165,000 square meters, the combined equivalent of about 24 soccer pitches.55 Also, like the spaces of the EXTERIORLESS, data centers are typically disengaged from a clear aesthetic agenda – except for a few cases that will be described later. Lastly, and most importantly, data centers’ existence depends on the vast amounts of energy they consume and on the heat they generate. Data centers mainly host computers. IT hardware is what requires the major amount of energy consumption: since its main purpose is to store and process data – CPU and memory – IT hardware accounts for about 50% of the electricity used in a data center. 25% of the total energy consumption is employed to cool down the server rooms, especially to prevent machines from overheating and to reach an ideal temperature between 10°C and 22°C. Cooling typically happens through mechanical devices such as pumps, cooling towers, and chillers. The remaining quarter of the energy consumed by data centers goes mainly to uninterruptible power supply (UPS), lighting, and transformers. Heat, therefore, is the battlefield through which to imagine the future of data centers – whether their future will imply the implementation of techniques aimed to prolong their existence or will imply their collapse and transformation in different spaces. In general, energy consumption can be addressed in two possible directions: first, electricity can come from renewable sources. Power supply coming for solar or wind energy could be an option, although it would imply some potential problems such as variability in production or obstruction of landscapes. Second, the output heat can be managed efficiently by reusing it, for example by converting it to hot water. Waste heat is currently one of the main issues on the table: while it does have less disadvantages than solar or wind energy, it wouldn’t be available in sufficient quantity during constant temporal intervals. Concrete efforts to optimize the energy efficiency of data centers have taken place worldwide: not only proposals to reuse exhausted heat and to distribute it to other public buildings but also to apply AI to save energy usage. In 2018, Google announced that thanks to AI, cooling could be autonomously managed at several of its data centers, by achieving a 30% reduction in electricity consumption.56 As for many other spaces of the EXTERIORLESS, data centers well express the evolving nature of global capitalism. The need to store and retrieve computer data, in fact, has constituted one of the most generative technological and infrastructural challenges of the last 75 years. In the 1950s and 1960s, universities, governments, and corporations built massive warehouses dedicated to housing punch cards and magnetic tapes. In the 1970s

74  Expanded Domains and 1980s, many tech writers imagined that the microprocessor revolution would obviate the need for massive physical storage facilities. However, with the proliferation of the internet in the 1990s, the need for information storage grew exponentially. Conventional buildings, originally designed for other purposes, were converted to accommodate cables, computers, and servers. In Downtown Los Angeles, for example, is a 39-story tower – a construction with a regular façade and with no peculiar formal qualities. Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) at their San Francisco branch, the building was supposed to house offices – window areas were in fact maximized to provide light and views for the occupants.57 In 1992, the tower – One Wilshire – became a carrier hotel, and on the fourth floor, a large meet-me-room (MMR) was installed – a space where different telecommunication companies could physically connect one to another and exchange data. In contradicting the modernist principle which inspired its construction – form follows function – One Wilshire solidifies a double contradiction: outside is a conventional tower, reflecting Fordist models of labor organization; inside is an interconnected world of cables, data, and information – one of the crucial hubs for Western U.S., where most of the traffic from the U.S. to Asia pass through the building.58 In addition, One Wilshire proves how virtual space needs physical space or infrastructures. Data are pervasive; they can run from one city to another: that is the case of the dark fiber connection between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Nasdaq data hub in Carteret, New Jersey. Constructed by Spread Networks in 2010 (now owned by Zayo Group Holdings, Inc.), the project consists of a large bundle of optical cables laid in a 1,331-kilometer trench and tunnel between the two points. While fiber optic lines generally follow existing underground sewer and utility ducts as well as railroad corridors, the Spread Network trench plies the straightest line possible, even boring through mountains and crossing farm fields to do so. At an initial cost of USD 300 million, the cable provides dark fiber – lines that lay dormant until called upon – especially for stockbrokers, to reduce latency by shaving 3 milliseconds off trading time, a crucial advantage in the high-speed, algorithm-driven world of arbitrage.59 In parallel with these huge investments, a real global fiber optics industry emerged in the 1990s, when the most successful raw fiber producers were American and Japanese companies. Gradually new players entered the market and activated trans-territorial collaborations. Today optical cables contain ‘Chinese cores, American fibers, and Swiss coating technology, produced by workers from Southeastern Europe; they are thus really a multinational product spanning at least three continents.’60 Most of the times, cables run undersea across the oceans to carry digital data – telephone and Internet. Originally introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century for telegraphy traffic, today submarine cables are structured around buffer zones that protect them from any possible interference with tankers or container ships, and around landing stations that

Expanded Domains 75 are typically located in industrial areas, technology parks, or small beach areas. As invisible as submarine cables are data centers, also called server farms. Images, books, and music, they all are contained in these sorts of warehouses characterized by endless rows of server racks and processors. As pointed out by Liam Young, data centers represent typologies without history and before culture, in the sense that they have arrived faster than our capacity to understand what they represent; but data centers are also contexts after geography where ‘place doesn’t matter in the same way that it used to, and the fact that these things – data centers – are out on the edges doesn’t mean they’re not important or central to who we are.’61 On the contrary, although data centers have been conceived to be forgotten, they are actually sites that are at the center of our lives; data centers are sites that all of us visit periodically, even if we are not physically able to access them. One of the reasons why data centers belong to the EXTERIORLESS has obviously to do with their apparent isolation from city centers and their need to be protected from external threats. Since the internet is frequently a target of espionage or cyberwar – an extension of the Cold War in the twenty-first century – the design of data centers has military and political implications. However, the information we have about these structures is mainly limited to centers run by internet service providers, whose main goal is to store their own servers. The red thread between the military world and data protection is evident at Pionen White Mountain, a former nuclear bunker in Stockholm, located 30 meters below Vita Berg Park. Originally built in 1943 to protect government activities from enemy attacks, the bunker was transformed in 2008 into a data center by architect Albert France-Lanord. Light, plants, water, and technology are imported from the surface in order to turn an inanimate rock interior into a living organism occupied by humans and other living beings. Home to the WikiLeaks servers, among others, Pionen White Mountain is still a bunker – an impassable fortress that serves as ironic contrast to the transparency and free access implicit in information technology. Although White Mountain is one of the first attempts to rethink the image of data centers and to move away from the utilitarian aspects of its spaces, its inaccessibility exemplifies the contradictions and ambiguities that come with the definition of new building typologies. Another similar insurmountable structure is located in Switzerland: its name is Swiss Fort Knox. Similar to Ireland, Switzerland has a huge concentration of data centers per capita in its territory – in 2016, the number of servers was 340,000.62 Considered a politically stable environment, strategically positioned in the heart of Europe and economically wealthy, Switzerland has attracted investors and companies from all over the world. Another important factor determining this interest in Switzerland was the price of electricity, lower than the one in other neighboring countries. Yet, the construction of data centers has produced a demand for electricity that Switzerland cannot satisfy without recurring to fossil fuels – coil, oil, natural

76  Expanded Domains gas – imported from countries such as Germany. In this respect, Swiss Fort Knox, an ensemble of data centers-related facilities located ‘deep inside the Alps’63 and built out of an existing bunker, represents a compelling case study. Presented as a construction resistant against any kind of military and civil threats – even a nuclear attack, Swiss Fort Knox originated in 1994 as the first joint venture between a private company and the Swiss Army, when Christoph Oschwald convinced the Federal Department of the Military to open a backup center inside one of their bunkers. Initially, clients could use the data center to rent 12-square-meter cells for the physical storage of their data disks.64 Since 1996, the data center progressively expanded, especially after a series of large-scale modifications that improved air circulation and security conditions. As all other similar structures in the world, Swiss Fort Knox too had to confront data centers’ major problem: heat. In 2008, a complex as well as extreme stratagem of exploitation was found: test drillings proved that water, potentially usable for cooling, was available underground at a depth of 30 meters. Two cooling stations were installed: ‘they pump in 8°C groundwater from the gravel basin of the valley into the bunker and then pump out the heated water 500 meters downstream.’65 Today Swiss Fort Knox stores data of administrations, banks, insurance companies, and private individuals from more than 30 countries. Swiss Fort Knox, Pionen White Mountain, and other data centers embed a paradox – the paradox of space. The more immaterial and intangible our everyday life becomes – from cloud storage to big data – the more obscure, segregated, and inaccessible its infrastructures are. Hidden behind Victorian houses, or buried 30 meters below the ground, the physical presence of data centers is inversely proportioned to the contents they store. This apparent contradiction doesn’t weaken capitalism’s image; on the contrary, it enhances its narrative and fascination. Outside of Europe, emblematic is the case of Singapore, which currently hosts approximately 50% of all the servers in South East Asia.66 The reason of data centers’ expansion in Singapore is mainly due to the presence of undersea cables that, as we have seen before, were originally introduced in the nineteenth century: Singapore, in fact, was connected to London (via Madras) and Hong Kong by telegraph cables in 1871. Today, Singapore maintains undersea cables to exert its economic influence on the region, to support its digital economy, and to move and receive information from the rest of the world. Singapore is perfectly integrated in the processes of global capitalism: its data centers – according to approximate estimates, there should be around 75 facilities on the island-state – have clients from governments, individuals, and private corporations: among those, are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Alibaba, Microsoft Azure, and Google. Many of the world’s largest technology companies and platforms, including Twitter, LinkedIn, Apple, and Hewlett Packard, have a regional headquarters in Singapore. The data centers running in Singapore are different in structure

Expanded Domains 77 and purpose. In their variety, they offer disparate speed, redundancy, path diversity, energy conservation, and scalability. The proliferation of data centers in Singapore is revealing because it brings to light economic and geo-political connections that the country has pursued over the years, as well as it testifies its role of logistical switch point. On the one hand, Singapore attempted to build an industrial base that could reach beyond the boundaries of South East Asia mainly through export; on the other hand, Singapore remains a point of regional commodity and labor exchange, as data centers in Singapore also serve clients and labor forces across South East Asia.67 While in theory data centers could be anywhere – if in proximity to fiber-­ optic cables, water, and cheap electricity – in reality they tend to cluster together with other crucial spatial byproducts of the EXTERIORLESS, ‘a near infinitude of human commerce and communication packed into a handful of buildings in a handful of locations. Even more so than other aspects of the digital landscape, the cloud could be dominated by a few places, and by a few companies, those with the most capacity and most connections.’68 The above prediction perfectly applies to Amazon, since the company decided to open its cloud-computing branch in 2003 – Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services is currently providing its services to many other important companies and even direct rivals. It is impossible to determine exactly how many data centers Amazon has built on the U.S. territory. Yet, what can be noticed with absolute certainty is that their number continues to grow exponentially: this is visible especially in some areas such as Northern Virginia. In Loudoun County, for example, by 2013 there were 40 data centers, covering 5 million square feet (464,000 square meters) – the equivalent of 25 Walmart supercenters – but the county is expecting to reach twice that number over the next decade.69 Walmart, on the contrary, doesn’t provide services to third parties but mainly utilizes its data centers for internal purposes. As commented earlier, data centers are one of the three main components constituting the skeleton of Walmart’s empire. While the supercenters are the most legible of Walmart’s structures, data centers are the most ambiguous: their boundaries are at the same time conceptually blurry, because of the expanded role they play in broader networks, and physically hermetic, contradistinguished by isolation and fortification – see the aforementioned data center in McDonald County, Missouri. In their ambivalence, Walmart’s data centers are exemplificative of the EXTERIORLESS condition. In both Amazon and Walmart’s models, data centers are almost self-­ sufficient. Human occupation is limited to few units: an Amazon data center with more than 200,000 square feet (19,000 square meters) and $400 million worth of servers and equipment requires only 20 engineers and technicians to function.70 In this respect, one might say that data centers express clearly some of the critical aspects intrinsic to the EXTERIORLESS: in particular, the constant struggle between humans and machines and, also,

78  Expanded Domains the progressive displacement from human-centered design to a new phase, where it is ‘the machines that occupy the spaces that now define the parameters of the architecture that contains them – an architecture whose form and materiality is configured to anticipate the logics of machine perception and comfort rather than our own.’71 Data centers are architectures without people, the materialization of that process of deconstruction of the anthropocentric thought initiated in the twentieth century from different sources – for example, poststructuralism or techno-science. Data centers illustrate a post-human condition that, as suggested by Pramod K. Nayar in his differentiation between transhumanism and critical post-humanism,72 is not about body engineering, cyborgs, or transplants. The human body has simply abandoned spaces like data centers forever, replaced by CPU processors and server racks.

Notes 1. See José van Dijck, “Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology,” Surveillance & Society 12, no. 2 (2014): 197–208. 2. Alan Berger and Charles Waldheim, “Logistics Landscape,” Landscape Journal 27, no. 2 (2008): 219–246, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43332450. 3. Clément Barbier, Cécile Cuny, and Nicolas Raimbault, “The Production of Logistics Places in France and Germany: A Comparison between Paris, Frankfurtam-Main, and Kassel,” Work Organization, Labor & Globalization 13, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 33, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/workorgalaboglob.13. 1.0030. 4. Ibid., 36. 5. Berger and Waldheim, “Logistics Landscape,” 229. 6. Ibid., 232. 7. Mimi Sheller and Esther Figueroa, “Geopolitical Ecologies of Acceleration: The Human after Metal,” New Geographies, no. 9 (2017): 108–113. 8. Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment. Winning and Losing in One-click America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 277. 9. R. Josh Scannell, “Policing the Future(s),” in Digital Lives in the Global City, eds. Deborah Cowen, Alexis Mitchell, Emily Paradis, and Brett Story (Toronto: UBC Press, 2020), 94. 10. Ibid., 95. 11. Ibid. 12. MacGillis, Fulfillment, 277. 13. Kim Moody, “Amazon: Context, Structure and Vulnerability,” in The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, eds. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 26. 14. Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack. On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2015), 93. 15. MacGillis, Fulfillment, 277. 16. Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics. Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 90. 17. See Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics. Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 167.

Expanded Domains 79 18. Andrew E. Kramer, “A New Hotel, Where the Stay Used to be Mandatory,” New York Times, December 3, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/ world/middleeast/camp-bucca-in-iraq-once-a-prison-base-now-houses-a-hotel. html?_r=0%7C. 19. Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, 167. 20. “Facility Overview,” Basra gateway terminal, accessed April 17, 2022, https:// www.ictsiiraq.com/facility-overview. 21. Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, 165. 22. Niccolò Cuppini and Mattia Frapporti, “Traiettorie della Logistica: Dalla Compagnia delle Indie ad Amazon,” accessed April 18, 2022, http://www. intotheblackbox.com/articoli/traiettorie-della-logistica-dalla-compagniadelle-indie-ad-amazon/. 23. See Martin Van Creveld, Supplying War. Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 24. Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, 31. 25. Ibid., 57. 26. Francesco Marullo, “Logistics Takes Command,” Log, no. 35 (Fall 2015): 120. 27. Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, 200. 28. Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade. Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (London: Verso Publishing, 2020), 40. 29. Marc Levinson, The Box. How the Shipping Container made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 31. 30. Ibid., 193. 31. Ibid., 92. 32. Geoff Manaugh, “Infrastructure as Processional Space. Where Tomorrow Arrives Today,” AD. Machine Landscapes. Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene, no. 257 (January 2019): 36–43. 33. Ibid., 40. 34. Victor M. Sanz, “Welcome to FutureLand,” Volume, no. 49 (September 2016): 33–39. 35. Ibid., 35. 36. Chris Dupin, “Rotterdam Dockworkers Authorize Strikes against Container Terminals,” American Shipper, November 30, 2015, https://www.freightwaves. com/news. 37. Levinson, The Box, 389. 38. Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, 67. 39. Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade, 115. 40. Ibid., 94. 41. Dara Orenstein, Out of Stock. The Warehouse in the History of Capitalism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 18. 42. See H.H. Manchester, “History of the Warehouse since 2200 BC.,” in Distribution & Warehousing (Cornell University, 1922). 43. Miroslav Pazdera, “The Shed: The Architecture of the A-Class Standard,” in Steel Cities. The Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha, and Martin Špičák (Zurich: Park Books AG, 2019), 87. 44. Ibid. 45. Marullo, “Logistics Takes Command,” 118. 46. LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics. 47. Ibid., 26. 48. Jessica Wood, “A Glimpse into a Dark Future: Amazon’s Logistics of Extraction and the Illusion of Efficiency,” Strelka Magazine, accessed April 18, 2022, https://strelkamag.com/en/article/jessica-wood-amazon-logicsof-extraction.

80  Expanded Domains 9. Moody, “Amazon: Context, Structure and Vulnerability,” 89. 4 50. See Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, “The Amazonification of Logistics: E-Commerce, Labor, and Exploitation in the Last Mile,” in The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, eds. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese (­London: Pluto Press, 2020). 51. See Francesco Massimo, “A Struggle for Bodies and Souls: Amazon Management and Union Strategies in France and Italy,” in The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, eds. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese (London: Pluto Press, 2020). 52. ANNEX, “States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape,” Strelka Magazine, accessed April 22, 2022, https://strelkamag.com/en/article/states-ofentanglement-data-in-the-irish-landscape. 53. Ibid. 54. Monika Dommann, Hannes Rickli, Max Stadler, Data Centers. Edges of a Wired Nation (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2020), 17. 55. Donal Lally, “The Sacred Fire of a Data Center,” Strelka Magazine, accessed April 15, 2022, https://strelkamag.com/en/article/the-sacred-fire-of-a-data-center. 56. Ibid. 57. Robert Summel and Kazys Varnelis, Blue Monday. Stories of Absurd Realities and Natural Philosophies (Barcelona: Actar, 2007), 63. 58. Dave Bullock, “A Lesson in Internet Anatomy: The World’s Densest Meet-me Room,”  Wired, accessed January 21, 2022, https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ gallery-one-wilshire/?slide=8&slideView=8. 59. See Stefano Corbo, “Notes from the Underworld: Excavation as Architectural Counter-History,” in The Routledge Handbook of Infrastructure Design, ed. Joseph Heathcott (London: Routledge, 2022). 60. Lena Kaufmann, “Swiss-Chinese Entanglements in Digital Infrastructures,” in Data Centers. Edges of a Wired Nation, eds. Monika Dommann, Hannes Rickli, and Max Stadler (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2020), 276. 61. Timur Zolotoev, “Landscapes of the Post-Anthropocene: Liam Young on Architecture without People,” Strelka Magazine, accessed April 17, 2022, https:// strelkamag.com/en/article/landscapes-of-the-post-anthropocene-­liam-youngon-architecture-without-people. 62. Silvia Berger Ziauddin, “The Data Bunker Is Not Just Anywhere: Historizing and Territorializing Flying Machines, Data and Men,” in Data Centers. Edges of a Wired Nation, eds. Monika Dommann, Hannes Rickli, and Max Stadler (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2020), 294. 63. Mount10, “Swiss Fort Know,” Mount10, accessed May 21, 2022, https://www. mount10.ch/en/mount10/swiss-fort-knox. 64. Berger Ziauddin, “The Data Bunker Is Not Just Anywhere,” 294. 65. Ibid. 66. Brett Neilson and Tanya Notley, “Data Centers as Logistical Facilities: Singapore and the Emergence of Production Topologies,” Work Organization, Labor & Globalization 13, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 17, https://www.jstor.org/ stable/10.13169/workorgalaboglob.13.1.0015. 67. Ibid., 17. 68. MacGillis, Fulfillment, 277. 69. Ibid., 283. 70. Ibid., 277. 71. Liam Young, “Neo-Machine. Architecture without People,” AD. Machine Landscapes. Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene, no. 257 (January 2019): 7. 72. See Pramod K. Nayar, Posthumanism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).

4

Forms of Urbanity

In the previous chapters, the EXTERIORLESS has been examined for both its intrinsic qualities – its infrastructural, formless character – and, also, for its expanded capacity to be at the same time local and global, visible and invisible. In addition to that, the last aspect characterizing the EXTERIORLESS has to do with its territorial impact – its pervasive ability to deform and irremediably alter urban dynamics as well as to create new ones. The architectures of the EXTERIORLESS produce forms of urbanity that span different continents – from Europe to North America, through some paradigmatic cases in the Middle East. Most importantly, these forms of urbanity overcome traditional organizational models: to borrow the words used by Andrea Branzi when presenting the state of architecture at the dawn of the twenty-first century, one might say that the city no longer foresees architecture; or, to put it differently, that the EXTERIORLESS presents itself as an alternative to the city.1 Also, as pointed out by Manuel Castells, the paradox of the twenty-first century is that we could easily keep living in an urban context in absence of the city itself, without spatial systems of sharing. 2 What is the nature of the current processes of urbanization? What is the role played by the EXTERIORLESS in those? In adopting the definition of planetary urbanization, Neil Brenner invites us to look beyond the territory formerly known as urban studies in order to detect new conditions and new possibilities corresponding to the current phase of capitalist development. In his conjectures, Brenner attempts to unfold interactions between urban infrastructure, land use, and connectivity across extended urban and operational landscapes, including mining, oil production, water, and energy flows, all of which feed into concentrated urban systems via transportation and logistics networks.3 Contemporary urbanization, for Brenner, is directly connected to capital over-­accumulation: its various manifestations – from zombie urbanism to smart cities, to logistics parks – are absorbing the surplus produced by capitalism. While sociologists such as Herbert Gans proposed to abandon analytic categories such as city, suburb, town, or rural, to replace ‘the inherited problematique of urban studies with that of a sociology of settlements based upon totally reinvented typologies of human spatial organization and DOI: 10.4324/9781003251736-4

82  Forms of Urbanity a more fluid understanding of interplace boundaries,’4 Neil Brenner aims to re-contextualize Henri Lefebvre’s account of the relationship between State and spatial organization, by integrating it with the analysis of contemporary phenomena, as well as by claiming that the concept of the city no longer corresponds to a social object. Sociologically, it is a pseudoconcept. 5 In his studies, in fact, Lefebvre relied on the role of the State as the main vector to shape and regulate urbanization processes. It is the State to govern urbanization, by producing large-scale forms of territorial development because only the State, Lefebvre thought, ‘is capable of taking charge of the management of space on a grand scale – highways, air traffic routes – and because only the State has at its disposal the appropriate resources, techniques, and conceptual capacity.’6 By consequence, in Lefebvre’s reading, the State, through its logistical infrastructures, stabilizes the volatile and relentless dynamics of capitalist urbanization. In other words, the State provides a fixed support for capital circulation. Other aspects of Lefebvre’s theory are that State space and the urban fabric are intertwined at all scales and that, through its strategies, the State also becomes more directly engaged in managing the contradictions that pervade the capitalist urban fabric – ‘value/use value, work/leisure, liberation/repression, need/desire, production/consumption, territorialization/deterritorialization, center/ periphery, and homogenization/fragmentation.’7 By revising Lefebvre’s assumptions, Neil Brenner suggests that from the 1980s onward, two major events occurred: first, capital accumulation, state regulation, urbanization, and other consolidated phenomena, typical of Fordism-Keynesianism, underwent a general process of destabilization, which produced a dispersed series of spatial levels; second, as a consequence of new sociopolitical strategies, forms, functions, and spatial organizations that once were only national, were recalibrated paving the way for inter-scalar configurations. Today, it is apparent that processes of urban governance are no longer confined to nationally centralized hierarchies of State power, but that urban development takes place through a series of State and non-State initiatives, whose goal is to accompany the needs of capitalist production and consumption. The EXTERIORLESS is a paradigmatic manifestation of such an ambivalence: its multiplicity consists of spatial byproducts that still represent the aspirations of State nations to position themselves as powerful economic players on the international scene – see Dubai or China; but it also includes spatialities that are directly connected to the expansion of private tech giants such as Amazon or Walmart. In either case, if we had to reduce the complexity of Brenner’s contributions to one single term, we could read the forms of urbanity generated by the EXTERIORLESS as spatial consequences of globalization or, to better say, in paraphrasing Saskia Sassen’s definition, as manifestations of the global city. When analyzing the progressive weakening of national boundaries, due to processes of privatization and deregulation, Sassen examines

Forms of Urbanity 83 globalization via specific manifestations: sub-national and supra-national entities, cross-border regions, and free trade blocs. The proliferation of these networked dynamics includes economic as well as political, cultural, and social aspects – Sassen, for example, looks at cross-border transactions among immigrant communities and communities of origin, as well as at the growth of international markets for art and a transnational class of curators, and at the growth of transnational networks of activists for environmental causes or human rights.8 The model of global city presented by Sassen develops across seven hypotheses.9 The first one has to do with the geographic dispersal of economic activities as primary effect of globalization; the second hypothesis consists in the parallel process of growth that involves central corporate functions: those functions become so complex and articulated that large global firms are forced to outsource them – especially when it comes to accounting, public relations, programming, and telecommunications; the third hypothesis includes a broad range of hyper-specialized competencies that can only take place in urban environments, in the sense that being in a city means to be immersed in a dense information loop; the fourth hypothesis, a consequence of companies outsourcing their functions, is that headquarters can be in any location, because work can be done everywhere; the fifth hypothesis is that specialized firms act within global networks of affiliates or partners which strengthen cross border city-to-city networks, and the destiny of those cities is every day more disconnected from their hinterlands or national economies; the sixth hypothesis is that the growing number of high-level professionals arriving in those cities produces the effect of exacerbating spatial and socio-economic inequality; and the last hypothesis is that a series of economic activities taking place in those same cities have profit rates that still do not allow them to compete for various resources with the high-profit making firms at the top of the system. The global city described by Sassen is therefore a constellation of entities that are at the same time place centered – because they are confined to specific strategic locations –, and trans-territorial – because they are deeply interconnected to other sites physically distant.10 Sassen’s definition provides a holistic understanding of the relationship between the forms of capitalism deriving from globalization and their effect on the urban space. At the same time, the global city is a networked society, in the sense that fundamental processes in technology, media, and institutions are organized through global ramifications. In this global network, the interaction among physical environments, social structure, and information generates the different expressions of the city based on variable geometries. If the global city is a space of flows, entries, connections, and connectors, one may say that the global city, of which the EXTERIORLESS is one of its heterodox symptoms, is therefore also a space of circulation, as brilliantly pointed out by Paul Virilio via his concept of dromology. Today people and objects need to move at a rapid pace on a global scale.

84  Forms of Urbanity Dromology (from Greek dromos: race course) is the underlying motor of history: although its origin is not necessarily linked to globalization – it is actually military – dromology determines the way cities are designed, at ‘the speed of the competitive capacities to envision, draw, map, curtail, mobilize, contour, stabilize, and police the polis.’11 Over the course of history, circulation has shaped urban space under various forms: from Baron Haussmann’s plan for Paris, where avenues and boulevards were since the beginning instrumental to repressive operations of policing, to the Nazi government’s emphasis on transport for the proletariat – Hitler convinced around 150,000 citizens to buy a Volkswagen car before those were even actually produced. The highway empties the street and prevents from any possible riot. Today, circulation determines the EXTERIORLESS too, as its architectures are conceived to offer smooth and disruption-free transmission within the networks of logistics capitalism. At the same time, the effectiveness through which the EXTERIORLESS shapes new urban dynamics depends on its ability to escape from the existing city and to act in substitution of it. In this respect, the way the EXTERIORLESS exerts its territorial influence can be compared to some urban phenomena of the past like those labeled by Edward W. Soja as exopolis: ‘the city without, to stress its oxymoronic ambiguity, its city-full non-city-ness. Perched beyond the vortex of the old agglomerative nodes, the exopolis spins new whorls of its own, turning the city inside-out and outside-in at the same time.’12 Soja’s concept of exopolis describes a specific moment in time in the evolution of the American city-scape, when downtown areas and generic suburbs were complemented with a multitude of fenced communities on the verge between involuntary segregation and sociological experimentation. The spaces of exopolis represent a new geography that invests on the peripheralization of activities, distant from the centers of power; these spaces are microcosms that pretend to ignore power structures by depicting an innocent and candid representation of reality where everything is possible. The exopolis is where ‘everyday life seems increasingly to have moved well beyond the simpler words of the artificial theme parks that you visit when you want to. The new theme parks now visit you, wherever you may be: the disappearance of the real is no longer revealingly concealed.’13 An example of exopolis is certainly Orange County, originally a republican enclave in progressive California. If in the mid-1950s Orange County was still somehow an unpretentious area, with little industry and few residential communities, in the following years, it has progressively attracted a middle class willing to take advantage of hi-tech and defense industries, uncontaminated natural environment, and recreational facilities – see Disneyland, that Charles Moore has defined as the most influential piece of postwar American urbanism. Disneyland and Disney World have populated not only the American territory but also Japan and France. As pointed out by Michael Sorkin, their aura transcends their physical sites: it is something all-pervasive, fueled by

Forms of Urbanity 85 films and television.14 If Disneyland in Anaheim, California, represents its archetype, Disney World in Orlando, Florida, represents the climax of the theme park as a form of urbanity. Its organization and scale have two distinct predecessors: the World’s Fair, being the 1851 fair in London the first great utopia of global capital, and the garden city. Disconnected by the surrounding fabric, Disneyland celebrates the spectacle of the anti-city, the petit bourgeoisie-like sentiment of the fantastic and, most of all, the reduction of space to commodity. In negating the existence of the city, Disneyland and other theme parks share analogies with some of the byproducts typical of the EXTERIORLESS such as logistics parks, techno-­cities, or even smart cities. If focusing on more recent episodes, in fact, one may say that another iconic representation of the current phase in capitalist development is certainly the broad concept of smart city. Although initially this definition applied to a very small number of projects that were conceived around 15 years ago – New Songdo in South Korea, or Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates – the term smart city has rapidly converted into a trend and an undefinable declaration of intents. Also, while in the beginning smart cities were supposed to indicate urban environments built from scratch, today every city in the world claims to be smart in some aspects of its urban life, whether this applies to traffic management, waste, or surveillance. See, for instance, the earlier mentioned Intelligent Operation Center built by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) for the city of Rio de Janeiro, an infrastructure that combines data from weather stations, police patrols, and social-media postings in order to improve the city’s overall performance; or the project called Moscow Smart City 2030, a two-stage proposal based on data infrastructure and artificial intelligence, which promises to boost living standards, increase mobility, and enhance competitiveness on a global scale. Not only IBM, but also Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and in the case of Moscow, Samsung and Huawei, are the companies behind these initiatives – the executors of a new form of entrepreneurial urbanism. The propaganda around smart cities is perfectly aligned to neoliberal policies, based on the privatization of public and state-driven services, the deregulation of activities between private actors, tax reduction or exemption to attract more and more investments. Masdar City, for example, is literally the ‘city’ owned by Masdar, an Abu Dhabi-based company responsible to develop and manage the site. Its ‘city’ is also recognized as a trading entity, and can operate as a special economic zone (SEZ) – an extra-state territory that is free from the Emirate’s ordinary taxation system. Similarly, New Songdo is located in a broader economic zone focused on increasing trade and business in the region. In other words, the smart city as a concept can only be understood within the general conditions produced by global capitalism, where urban agglomerates compete against each other to attract capital and human resources.

86  Forms of Urbanity To quote Adam Greenfield, one could say that ‘the smart city’s organic capacity for data-driven process optimization, its seamless interweaving of public and private action, and its organization for the convenience of administration can clearly be seen for what they are: merely the most recent additions to the armature of enticements and amenities a city must offer in order to be considered a credible contender as a destination for investment flows.’15 While Greenfield is interested in highlighting the serious problems that lie at the core of the idea of smart city – especially its incapacity to respond to the demands of all its citizens, and the combination of different surveillance practices fueling its implementation –, what emerges from the models put in place by IBM and others is that cities can be treated not only as abstract and absolute realms but also as a testing ground to pursue other interests, such as territorial occupation. That is the case of Gaza, where in 2014, UN, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority signed an agreement to supposedly facilitate the reconstruction of the area, by mapping every single building project and encouraging the inflow of construction materials. A database called GRAMMS (Gaza Reconstruction and Materials Monitoring System) was implemented: for any project – single housing or infrastructure – an application including the exact location of the building, the purpose of the construction, and the amount of material requested had to be submitted electronically. The result was a centralized system that compiles information from Gaza: as ironically pointed out by Francesco Sebregondi, ‘after it was levelled by smart bombs, Gaza is arguably being turned into a smart city.’16 Planetary urbanization, global city, data urbanism: the EXTERIORLESS deploys its weapons on the verge of these definitions, prefiguring scenarios that, as we have seen before, cross different scales, and include multiple layers, both tangible and intangible. This chapter investigates the forms of urbanity generated by the EXTERIORLESS according to a multiple perspective: first as a complex of spatial byproducts that to some extent have been initiated or conceived by State authorities. We will study, in fact, the rise and the implementation of free-trade zones (FTZs), with a specific focus on China as well as on Dubai’s processes of economic expansion. Second, we will examine public-private partnerships, like in the case of the so-called Steel Cities – logistics parks which are established through ad hoc legislation by public authorities in order to attract multi-national investments. Lastly, aggressive strategies of urban colonization, put in place by private actors such as Amazon or Walmart, will be presented – from Walmart’s progressive erosion of Vermont’s borders, to Amazon’s invisible acupunctural invasion of Manhattan through a diversified series of services and spaces. In complementing the EXTERIORLESS’ capacity to act as an interface and as an expanded domain, these forms of urbanity not only determine how objects, people, and content circulate but also shape the city of the twenty-first century.

Forms of Urbanity 87

Figure 4.1 Jack Rivolta, Poster for the City of New York Department of Docks, Showing Five Ocean Liners, 1937. Notes: T he United States’ first foreign trade zone: Staten Island, City of New York, opened February 1, 1937. Courtesy: © Library of Congress

Figure 4.2  Container Terminal, Singapore, 2017. Courtesy: © Chuttersnap

88  Forms of Urbanity

Figure 4.3  CTPark Bor, Czech Republic. Satellite view Courtesy: © Google Earth

Forms of Urbanity 89

(Extra)State and Space Although the EXTERIORLESS describes recent phenomena, it is however possible to detect some historical precedents that, to a certain degree, have served as embryonal representations of what we see today. In one of the previous chapters, for instance, we have examined the genesis of the EXTERIORLESS by studying specific architectural proposals of the 1960s and 1970s. In jumping to a different scale – to the relationship between the EXTERIORLESS and urbanization processes – one cannot but refer to another relevant historical precedent: the free port and, more in general, the free economic zone – extra-state areas of legal, fiscal, and territorial uniqueness. Free ports have always existed – as enclaves within states, in which sovereignty was suspended or was substantially porous. Their history is complex and for some aspects still unclear, but their presence throughout the centuries has proved to be a major factor in turning trade into a global operation. In this respect, the Mediterranean, since Roman times, has been the cradle of free ports: Italian, Phoenician, Armenian, and Muslim trade routes needed ad hoc areas of encounter and exchange; in the following centuries, other regions experimented forms of trade through free ports – from the free cities in the Baltic and the North Seas, to the Hanseatic League. Cities such as Hamburg, Lübeck, Rostock, or Gdansk were all extremely active and influential. Marseille, Genoa, and Livorno became early free ports too, followed by other cities in the seventeenth century such as Naples, Venice, and Copenhagen. Trade became really global only starting from the end of the eighteenth century, when the Americas were included in trade networks: free ports were established in South America and the Caribbean. After that, the British and the French opened free ports in Hong Kong (1841), Singapore (1819), or in Aden (1853), by shaping in its germinal state a set of trade relationships that in some forms persists today. Free ports have functioned for centuries as early manifestations of a very specific form of extra-territoriality: the special economic zone (SEZ). The term SEZ includes other subcategories such as free-trade zones (FTZs), export-processing zones (EPZs), free zones (FZs), bonded logistics parks (BLPs), and urban enterprise zones (UEZs). While SEZs have been established starting from the 1950s, it is mainly after the 1970s that one can see its systematic use in specific areas of the world. Exemplificative is the case of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, opened by Deng Xiaoping in 1980 to foster industrialization in the region and to attract foreign investment, followed by other zones in Xiamen, Shantou, Zhuhai, and the entire province of Hainan – pioneer experiments with market economy. Years before, in 1965, six FTZs were established in South Korea and one in Taiwan – the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone. In analyzing the evolution of zones from a historic perspective, sociologist Xiangming Chen has detected three main phases of development. The first phase, as seen before, is partially related to the experience of free ports and goes from the mid-1500s to the 1930s. The second phase corresponds to the late 1950s until 1970s and is

90  Forms of Urbanity characterized by the rise of EPZs. The third phase begins in the 1980s and corresponds to the proliferation of zones such as the SEZs or the science industrial parks (SIPs).17 In its multiple articulations, the zone represents the archetype of the contemporary global city, a miniature of the intertwined relationships between different players: as pointed out by Keller Easterling, who examined these phenomena through the lens of infrastructure space, zones have become more and more attractive not as a legal or economic instruments in themselves, but for the series of incentives that the founding of those zones implied for cities or entire nations: ‘holidays from income or sales taxes, dedicated utilities like electricity or broadband, deregulation of labor laws, prohibition of labor unions and strikes, deregulation of environmental laws, streamlined customs and access to cheap imported or domestic labor, cheap land and foreign ownership of property, exemption from import/export duties, foreign language services, or relaxed licensing requirements.’18 Shenzhen, mentioned above, is perhaps the most extreme example of SEZ, since its economy and image have drastically changed over the last 40 years. Originally a small fishing village, Shenzhen is today a megalopolis with more than 13 million inhabitants. Shenzhen’s SEZ includes the entire city – other distinguishing factor from the majority of SEZs – and encompasses business and residential programs. Besides the typical incentives of a SEZ, what made Shenzhen’s experiment dramatically attractive was the availability of low rent and, above all, cheap labor. Exploitation, unsafety, physical and psychological abuses are still some haunting problems of Shenzhen’s extended factory model; at the moment, forms of civic activism have only manifested among the middle class, and are mostly limited to protests against real estate prices. In Chapter 3, when discussing the role of ports as expanded domains, we have examined the stratified history of Dubai – from being a British colony to become a logistics and economic empire. In its ambition to diversify the Emirati economy apart from oil, Dubai regarded logistics as the main instrument to become a global hub, at the intersection of Europe, Africa, and Asia. If Shenzhen as a city is a zone, Dubai as a city-state is also a zone, whose first FTZ was founded in 1985 – the Jebel Ali Free Zone. Since then, other zones have proliferated, each with a specific name or program: Dubai Internet City, Dubai Health Care City, Dubai Maritime City, Dubai Silicon Oasis, Dubai Knowledge Village, Dubai Techno Park, Dubai Media City, Dubai Industrial City, and Dubai International City. The incentives that each of these zones can offer are somehow similar, and go from inexpensive labor to agile customs operations, to special rights in real estate properties. Dubai has also prototyped another unique spatial articulation: the logistics city. Dubai Logistics City (DLC), opened in 2007, constitutes in fact a precedent for many other settlements around the world, as it is a combination of authoritarian politics and wild neo-liberal trade, which characterizes itself for the extreme conditions under which labor and security are performed in its interior. Over the years, serious concern has arisen about

Forms of Urbanity 91 labor practices and human rights in Dubai. For instance, among the most problematic components of the ensemble called DLC is the so-called Labor Village. Each zone in Dubai has its own village, but the one conceived for DLC meant to originally accommodate more than 40,000 workers, and to be integrated with restaurants, community facilities, mosques, and sport centers.19 Described by local media as a luxury camp for blue-collar inhabitants, the Labor Village is in reality the Potemkin village of Dubai’s logistics regime: it is an extended form of spatial confinement that acts as a prison, a symbolic fortress from which it is impossible for workers to evade. Strikes and trade unions, in fact, are illegal in the UAE, and the majority of workers are foreigners on temporary work permits whose contractual power is obviously very weak. Noncitizen labor is what characterizes Dubai’s everyday life: ‘noncitizens make up 99% of the private work force (two-thirds of which are South Asian), and out of the 4.5 million people officially residing in the city, only 800,000 are Emirati citizens.’20 Participation in strikes can provoke permanent expulsion from the country. Furthermore, biometric data as well as cameras surveil the workers’ bodies and control that they are aligned with logistics’ dynamics. As shown in Dubai’s case, today zones are everywhere and take on various names: logistics cities, cyber cities, techno-cities, IT parks, and so on. Skolkovo, for example, is an innovation center announced in 2009 and built on the outskirts of Moscow, thanks to the contribution of famous local and international architects such as Arup, Bernaskoni, Herzog & De Meuron, and David Adjaye. On the one hand, Skolkovo represents the natural evolution of the first science cities built by the USSR in the 1950s – see Akademgorodok (the Academic City), near Novosibirsk in Siberia. On the other hand, similar to other coeval initiatives, Skolkovo is a zone subject to incentives such as exemption from VAT, property tax, land tax, and reimbursement of customs duties.21 While the port of Los Angeles includes an on-site FTZ – called The Los Angeles/Long Beach FTZ – established in 1994 and composed of warehousing facilities compatible for global shipping and distribution over an area of more than 2,700 acres (1,090 ha), in Europe, Antwerp is not only a port but a world logistics center which benefits from its strategic location: 60% of the European Union (EU) purchasing power is in a radius of 500 km. In addition, Antwerp has more than 500 direct destinations all over the world; it can offer connection to more than 700 European distribution centers, more than 6 million square meters of covered storage space, a container capacity for 15 million TEU, and 6 dedicated container terminals. 22 Although technically Antwerp is not a free port – nations such as Belgium, France, Norway, and Sweden don’t have free ports – its influence reaches beyond its physical boundaries to define an (extra)state space of hegemony: in Laakdal, 50 miles southeast of Antwerp, ‘Nike built one of Europe’s largest distribution centers to receive containers of clothing and sporting goods by barge, allowing the company to tout its environmentally friendly logistics system.’23Also, Antwerp serves other logistics facilities: ‘arriving containers filled with cucumbers from Israel and bananas from Ecuador go by barge

92  Forms of Urbanity or rail to Venlo, in the Netherlands, where dozens of businesses clean, sort, and package the produce for delivery to European supermarkets. Barges and trains ferry cargo up the Rhine to Duisburg, in Germany, where the sites of a defunct steel mill and a smelter have been remade as logistics centers employing thousands.’24 In the empire of logistics, single spatial entities such as shipping containers and warehouses are critical but limited components of larger processes. Packaging, ordering, assembling, storing, transferring, distributing, etc., require oftentimes other structures – ensembles of buildings where multiple actions can take place simultaneously, whose impact on the built environment has not fully investigated yet mainly because their configuration is always evolving. These compounds are ambiguous – as ambiguous as the EXTERIORLESS condition they represent – because they are typically situated in undefined contexts that are not as dense as urban fabric, not as extended as sprawl, not only suburban, not only rural. Once combined in larger structures, the spatial byproducts of logistics act as one multi-layered assemblage, a synthesis of warehousing, fulfillment, inventory management, and even management of material flow. This composite entity, finite and multiple at the same time, describes an interiorization of capital which compresses distances into an expanded, context-less, and globalized unity, potentially exportable everywhere in the world. In Europe, the presence of logistics architecture is growing every day. In particular, Central and Eastern Europe have recently seen the proliferation of warehouses, logistics hubs, and new infrastructures that are supposed to optimize the communication and transportation of goods across the entire continent. The so-called logistics parks represent one specific conformation of this tendency. Logistics parks are multinational enterprises which consist of different elements. Tadeáš Říha identifies five main components: ‘first is a foreign or foreign-owned developer corporation like Panattoni, P3, CTP, or Prologis who build and rent out the sheds; second are the global property consultancies like Cushman & Wakefield, managing the sales and rentals; third are the actual retail or industrial tenants like Primark, Amazon, or Foxconn; fourth are the logistics operators such as DHL managing the sheds for those tenants; and fifth, most problematically, is the partforeign, part-local personnel agency element, with companies like Hofmann, Randstad, and Adecco who supply and when necessary “unsupply” the working force according to the fluctuating demand of the market.’25 One of the reasons determining the construction of these logistics parks is proximity to existing infrastructures that can handle inbound and outbound freights. This is why, in most cases, logistics parks are located near rail hub and especially seaports since, as we have seen earlier, goods mostly travel by sea. When infrastructuring is required – including power, internal roads, access roads, and other utilities – such operations are typically financed by the State, or through public-private partnerships. These forms of public participation can be both governmental and municipal.

Forms of Urbanity 93 International-standard Class A warehouses represent the main constitutive elements of logistics parks: they are easy to build, potentially usable in any context because of their formal indifference, and efficient enough to serve the purpose they are supposed to be designed for. Nevertheless, their environmental impact is devastating: ‘their greenhouse gas footprint is about 18 times greater than the proportional area of an agricultural field, even if gases like methane and nitrous oxide are taken into account.’26 Logistics parks only grow where economic and fiscal conditions are particularly advantageous. As a consequence of 2004’s formal adhesion to the EU, the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) comprising Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary has become an ideal space of delocalization for economic activities from UK, Germany, and France, given low costs and cheap labor. Here the construction of logistics parks where goods are unpacked, sorted, and repacked for e-shops in Western Europe has proliferated, giving birth to a phenomenon that some authors have called Steel Cities – where steel refers to the predominant material employed in their construction. The Steel Cities can be read as the perpetuation of Eastern Europe’s dependency on the West, by exacerbating inequalities, unsustainable building practices, and precarious labor conditions. Daniel Šitera writes that the Steel Cities depict the reorganization of socio-spatial relations from intraregional to international inequalities: in result, ‘the westernmost East becomes chained up into a hierarchical network wherein the highest value – labor incomes, capital profits, and tax levies – is captured in national, continental, and global metropoles.’27 Ad hoc legislation was approved by single countries, which soon started competing with each other to attract more and more multinational companies. Countries like Bulgaria and Turkey, for example, have recently offered the automobile giant Volkswagen tax exemption and free land to convince the German company investing in their territory. In Slovakia, the Industrial Parks Act addresses the complex regulation of industrial parks, including special procedural rules for the transfer of land to municipalities or regional authorities. 28 The European Commission, for its part, has introduced new programs for sustainable investments – Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas (JESSICA) – which aim to foster industrial zones, business, and trade through public-private partnerships. In Bulgaria, 80% of the projects funded by JESSICA are industrial and logistics parks. 29 One concrete example of Steel Cities is CTPark Bor – the largest Czech business park, located only 15 km away from the German border. CTPark Bor covers an area of more than 134 ha and employs more than 4,000 workers. Based on logistics facilities and Class A warehouses, CTPark Bor has at the moment 15 tenants, among which are the Irish company Primark and Lufthansa.30 While Lufthansa utilizes this facility to prepare food packages for in-flight meals and benefits from the employment of seasonal

94  Forms of Urbanity workers, Primark operates in collaboration with DHL on a global scale: ‘the clothing, sewn cheaply in Asia, is unloaded from ships in Rotterdam. In an identical container, already adjusted on hangers, it is transported in stages further inland. Then, the trucks cross the Czech-German border and arrive at CTPark Bor.’31 Other multinational companies are targeting Central and Eastern Europe: Amazon, for instance, has several warehouses in Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, employing more than 1,500 workers. In its process of expansion, Amazon had to face internal and external oppositions. In 2014, in the village of Dobrovíz, citizens protested against the opening of an Amazon logistics center, supported by the official appeal of the local municipality. Their voice was simply ignored and overruled by the regional authority of Central Bohemia which approved the project without hesitation. Similarly, in Brno, the city council initially decided not to update the zoning map and not to sell the land to Amazon’s developer CTP. The then Czech Prime Minister intervened publicly to support Amazon’s project; the national government offered Amazon new locations around Brno. Finally, ‘following three unsuccessful votes, the Brno city council changed the zoning map – yet also too late: Amazon had already decided to move the project to Slovakia.’32 At the same time, Amazon is also finding resistance internally, among its workers. In logistics parks, in fact, automation technologies are still limited, which means that their architectures are mainly occupied by human labor. Although one of the supposed goals of initiatives such as the JESSICA Program was to attract new jobs for the areas where logistics parks were built, most of the workers commute from distant cities or come from other countries such as Romania and Ukraine. Sticking to the context of Amazon in the Steel Cities, Polish workers have been at the forefront of protest against labor conditions in the American company’s workplaces. In Poland, similar to other CEE countries, Amazon opened its first warehouses in 2014. Here strikes and protests have systematically taken place since 2015, when workers were told that their shifts would be extended by an hour. Poland, as pointed out by Jörn Boewe and Johannes Schulten, plays the role of an extended packing table; working hours are different from other large countries – see Germany and Italy – and wages are low: ‘in 2019, the hourly wage in Poland ranged from €4.12 to €4.36, compared to a range from €10.96 to €13.04 among the great majority of German workers.’33 Cooperation and networking can act as a counterweight to Amazon’s hegemony: on April 9, 2013, the first strike at Amazon in Germany took place. That event – actually the first strike in all Amazon’s history – paved the way for similar initiatives in other European countries and, also, favored the organization of coordinated international activities among unions. The connections between German and Polish workers, for example, have translated into biannual congresses open to all Amazon workers across Europe.

Forms of Urbanity 95 In some countries, however, Amazon can still put in place its labor practices freely without encountering resistance. That is possible because of the absence of unions within its facilities: see the case of the U.S., where only in April 2022 workers in Staten Island, New York City, voted in favor of a union; or the UK, where the local union GMB is slowly building up representation, despite more than 20,000 workers are currently employed in Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Over the years, Amazon has carried out various strategies to limit, discourage, or suppress forms of workers organization: from one-to-one meetings with HR managers aimed to prevent possible actions or initiatives, to the systematic reliance on a unbalanced combination of permanent and temporary contracts, which is central to its business model and creates a distinction between workers that are employed by Amazon directly and those hired temporarily by work agencies, vulnerable because potentially subject to retaliations. Apart from the phenomenon of the Steel Cities, in their complex ensemble of legal, political, and spatial dispositives, logistics parks are not only interfaces within expanded domains of global trade. Logistics parks also contribute to shape forms of urbanity, since we can situate their activities at the core of the dichotomy between city logistics and logistics cities introduced by Deborah Cowen. Cowen’s main point develops from the concept of city logistics, as it was defined in the late 1990s by the Institute for City Logistics in Kyoto. According to this definition, city logistics is a process of optimization of logistics in urban areas considering traffic environment, traffic congestion, and energy consumption. Deborah Cowen expands her reflections on this concept by overlapping it to the notion of logistics cities. City logistics and logistics cities are two different entities: ‘city logistics acts on already constituted urban spaces, aiming to transform dense and congested cities into more controlled and efficient spaces of circulation, whereas logistics cities entail the wholesale production of entirely new urban formations for that same purpose. City logistics is a piecemeal practice that acts on already established urban fabric, reconstituting it and territorializing a logistics form. On the other hand, logistics cities are master-planned spaces, standardized and purpose-built.’34 Cowen’s conclusion therefore is that logistics cities and city logistics have similar functions in the urban space but different forms. In building upon Cowen’s differentiation, one may say that logistics parks occupy an in-between position: on the one hand, they exist to optimize circulation and distribution in urban areas, taking advantage of existing infrastructures; on the other hand, they are novel conformations, designed through standardization in order to introduce new territorial and regional dynamics. Whether logistics parks belong to the notion of city logistics or to that of logistics city, they represent the larger spatial byproduct of a trio that – along with containers and warehouses – shapes the architectures of the EXTERIORLESS.

96  Forms of Urbanity

Figure 4.4  Amazon Headquarters, Seattle. Courtesy: © SounderBruce

Forms of Urbanity 97

The Privatized City While in Europe Amazon had to confront strong resistance from public and private local actors – from organized unions to environmental activists – and its power is still not completely pervasive, in the U.S. territory, on the contrary, the Seattle-based empire has been able to control, manipulate, and permeate large areas of the national market. In this respect, the relationship of Amazon with its hometown is highly exemplificative. Although Amazon’s engagement in the social life of Seattle has been absent for long time, in 2017 the city government and the company initiated an exchange of threats and retaliations that lasted for some years. Everything began from the proposal to tax Amazon and other large companies as a response to the proliferating social plague of homelessness in Seattle. This proposal came from a coalition named Trump-Proof Seattle but soon gained consensus and the support of the city council that, in November of the same year, created a task force to look for various sources of revenue that could alleviate people in danger. Companies were invited to join the task force but declined to do it. The task force’s works went on and in April, a proposal for an Employee Hours Tax was formally brought to the table, provoking the opposition of most business in the city. A month later, before the council had voted on this tax, Amazon announced to pause construction in its downtown office tower by threatening that the company was reconsidering its presence in Seattle for the next years should the tax be approved. 35 Behind the scenes, negotiations between Amazon and the mayor’s office began: the final deal consisted of a tax of $275 per employee, 50% less of the initial proposal of $500. The council officially passed the tax bill on May 14 with the semi-public approval of Amazon; however, immediately after the official approval, Amazon gave $25,000 to No Tax On Jobs, a committee created explicitly to put a referendum on the ballot to repeal the head tax – the same committee received funds from other companies such as Starbucks, Kroger, and Vulcan. Less than a month after the approval of the employee tax, under the threat of local businesses, the city council considered repealing it. Eventually, the repeal was passed: seven of the nine councilmembers voted against the tax. A few years later, in affirming its political ability to determine interests and priorities of the city, Amazon announced a $48.8 million gift to a local housing non-profit – ‘a number suspiciously close to what the “head tax” would have raised annually, as if to underscore that philanthropy is their preferred mode of contributing to the common good.’36 Not less problematic has been Amazon’s adventure in New York, whose HQ2 failed project represented a turning point in its relationship with the Big Apple. The HQ2 project – an attempt to build a second headquarters on the East Coast – was actually a competition among different cities which pitched themselves to Amazon by offering a series of incentives, mainly

98  Forms of Urbanity tax exemptions and subsidies. Twenty cities got to the final round of the competition, which consisted in a $2.5 billion investment able, according to Amazon, to produce more than 25,000 new jobs. While New York initially proposed five potential areas, final choice was Long Island City, on the East river, across from the United Nations building. In beating other cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, on November 13, 2018, Amazon announced that HQ2 would be split in two different areas: Long Island City and Crystal City in Arlington, VA. Mayor De Blasio and Governor Cuomo immediately promised to invest $1.7 billion in incentives to support Amazon’s opening. Protests began: politicians, groups, and unions raised their voice against the tax breaks promised to Amazon, against Amazon’s union opposition, and against the risk of gentrification that Long Island City would be subject to. After months of demonstrations, public hearings, and negotiations, on February 14, 2019, Amazon announced its withdrawal from the HQ2 project in New York. Despite accusations to local politicians for conveying wrong messages to their electors, Amazon’s decision to leave NYC was only a bluff: Amazon’s expansion in the city in fact, continued inexorably on two separate levels. On the one hand, in December 2019, Amazon signed a lease for 335,000 square feet (31,000 square meters) of office space in the new Hudson Yards development in Manhattan: big corporations are always dependent on cities because it is in the cities where they can attract high-qualified human capital. On the other hand, Amazon slowly invaded NYC through a series of small-scale, almost invisible, acupunctural nodes. In a recent research work, Ingrid Burrington has mapped Amazon’s presence in New York by detecting various forms of colonization – distribution hubs, Amazon lockers, and Amazon Web Services (AWS): ‘taking inventory of Amazon’s existing physical footprint in the city, one begins to perceive a shadow infrastructure at work which reshapes urban environments more through privatized logistics and information systems than through campus construction.’37 The strategy of invasion ideated by Amazon after experiencing the resistance of the local community against the HQ2 project has been silent and discrete: in 2019, Burrington counted a 50,000-square-foot (4,600 square meters) warehouse and distribution center located in Midtown Manhattan, a 855,000-square-foot (79,000 square meters) fulfillment center in Staten Island, and a new fulfillment center in Woodside, Queens. In addition to that, two distribution hubs were localized in Brooklyn and Manhattan, along with more than 260 Amazon lockers. After acquiring Whole Foods in 2017, in fact, Amazon installed its lockers in almost all the supermarkets of the city. The acquisition of Whole Foods was strategic also for another reason: ‘Amazon was not interested in Whole Foods in order to sell produce so much as to gain access to the grocery company’s rich trove of retail data, which Amazon could use to jump-start its own grocery operations.’38 Amazon’s ramified presence in NYC is then completed by Photo Studio, Amazon Web Services (AWS),

Forms of Urbanity 99 and co-working spaces. Amazon Photo Studio is a 40,000-square-foot (3,700 square meters) structure located in a former glass manufacturing plant, whose purpose is to produce images for Amazon Fashion, the company’s online apparel section. AWS, as seen before, is a cloud computing platform – the most profitable area of Amazon’s revenue. Only a few data centers are located in the city, with AWS loft in Soho, opened in 2015, being its most famous example. Its spaces include co-working facilities for startup companies as well as training centers for AWS products. In observing the variety of services provided, one can realize that Amazon is much more than a retail company: it is a logistics company that deals with data (AWS), labor (Amazon Mechanical Turk), and even entertainment (Twitch, Amazon Studio Production). What Amazon accomplished in New York is to build an invisible network, which runs parallel to the city but conflicts with part of it, since this multiplicity of interests oftentimes collide with public instances. As sophisticated as Amazon’s strategy in New York are Walmart’s operations in Vermont. Similar to Amazon, Walmart has become over the years not only a retail company but also a logistics company, notorious for its low wages, poor benefits, and highly gendered and racialized labor force.39 Coherent with the logic of the EXTERIORLESS, Walmart is global and local at the same time: it is global because it operates in 23 countries outside the U.S., with more than 5,100 retail units and approximately 550,000 workers around the world40; but Walmart is also profoundly local because in spite of its international activities, its management operations are rooted in a very remote corner of the U.S. – Bentonville, Arkansas – which is where the company was founded and still has its headquarters. The local character of Walmart’s enterprise is also due to the series of urban strategies that the company has put in place over the years, like in the case of Vermont. Erosion is the keyword to understand Walmart’s patient attempt to penetrate the Vermont market and to open its facilities there. At the beginning of the 1990s, no Walmart structures were present in Vermont: the state of Vermont and its Supreme Court, in fact, had previously denied access to the company for several times, seconding the concerns of local population drawing business away from the city centers in favor of sprawling premises on the outskirts. In this dichotomy between city and anti-city sentiments, Walmart built its own strategy of occupation: as Sam Walton, Walmart’s founder, repeatedly declared, the company’s goal was not actually going into the city, but to build a ring of stores around the city. In the specific case of Vermont, rather than abandoning its plans, Walmart began to build a series of supercenters all around the borders of the state by progressively attracting customers from within and by acquiring a more dominant position in the local market: ‘Walmart effectively saturated the market without ever entering it.’41 After acknowledging the situation, local municipalities gradually agreed to start negotiations with the company. In 1997, ‘facing

100  Forms of Urbanity the increasing out-migration of its retail tax base,’42 Vermont eventually approved Walmart’s entry into the state. Less subliminal but equally alarming is what Walmart accomplished in its hometown, Bentonville. The small town where it all started, Bentonville is still home to the Walmart’s headquarters. As pointed out by Jesse LeCavalier, Walmart’s centrifugal growth has paired, somehow, with a centripetal accumulation of new spaces and opportunities. In Bentonville, Walmart reshaped the existing city by building dwellings for executives, green areas, and recreational facilities. Bentonville became a sort of Walmart theme park whose main attraction is the Walmart Museum. Bentonville is today an EXTERIORLESS city, a privatized space under Walmart’s supervision, generated by logistics. Its boundaries are extended, arriving to include other small towns – what the U.S. census designates as Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers Metropolitan Statistical Area. This form of urbanity is ‘defined by a commitment to promoting the value of the free market not just as a means to profit but also as a belief system and as a way of life.’43 The entire region has attracted new investments, a huge number of people who decided to move there intrigued by elevated lifestyle expectations, and even tourism. Bentonville turned into a magnet for visitors, tourists, employees from other states, and also for suppliers who realized that their business could only benefit from being closer to Walmart’s main offices. Commercial and office activities have settled in Bentonville; they have occupied buildings that borrow an ‘idiom of inexpensive, rapidly produced housing stock, partly reflective of the transient nature of their tenants, subject as they are to the fluctuating demands Walmart places on them. Similarly, as these offices are rendered in a language of domestic architecture, they are camouflaged to some extent within their context of developer-driven subdivisions of single-family houses.’44 The analysis of Walmart’s initiatives in Vermont, in Arkansas, and in other areas of the United States helps decipher the actual essence of the company – a company based on logistics. Walmart combines distribution, transportation planning, supply chain management, and predictive behavior models in order to find new possible locations and to implement new strategies of expansion. Over the years, Walmart has built its empire through a wide range of weapons: taking advantage of legislative gaps, exacerbating discordance between local and national actors, and persuading citizens with the perspective of cheap and accessible products. Eventually, what Walmart – and also Amazon – achieved is a disseminated network of flows, buildings, and infrastructures that all obey the same intertwined logic: the logic of the EXTERIORLESS. As we have seen in this chapter, the forms of urbanity generated by the EXTERIORLESS define a space of existence that has not to do with a specific form but with multiple and malleable techniques of territorial governance. Within such an ever-changing context, the byproducts of the

Forms of Urbanity 101 EXTERIORLESS seem to oscillate between hyper-control, isolation, and anonymity; the reality is that hyper-control is always instrumental to freedom of movement (goods), isolation is instrumental to smoothness (communication), and anonymity is instrumental to expansion (profit). The EXTERIORLESS certifies and translates the needs of current capitalist development into space.

Notes 1. See Andrea Branzi, Weak and Diffuse Modernity. The Worlds of Projects at the Beginning of the 21st century (Milan: Skira, 2006). 2. See Manuel Castells, La Città delle Reti (Venezia: Marsilio, 2004). 3. Mimi Sheller, Esther Figueroa, “Geopolitical Ecologies of Acceleration: The Human after Metal,” New Geographies, no. 9 (2017): 108–113. 4. Neil Brenner, New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 327. 5. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 57. 6. Henri Lefebvre, “Space and the State”, in Space, State, World: Selected Essays, eds. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 238. 7. Brenner, New Urban Spaces, 74. 8. Saskia Sassen, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept,” Brown Journal of World Affairs XI, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2005): 31. 9. Ibid., 28. 10. Ibid., 39. 11. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics. An Essay on Dromology (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), 11. 12. Edward W. Soja, “Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County,” in Variations on a Theme Park. The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 95. 13. Ibid., 121. 14. See Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park. The New American City and the End of Public Space, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). 15. Adam Greenfield, Against the Smart City (New York: Do Projects, 2013), 61. 16. Francesco Sebregondi, “The Smart City of Gaza,” Volume, no. 49 (September 2016): 85. 17. See Xiangming Chen, “The Evolution of Free Economic Zones and the Recent Development of Cross-National Growth Zones,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, no. 19 (1995): 593–621. 18. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (London: Verso Publishing, 2014), 52. 19. “DLC will have labor village,” Khaleej Times, April 2, 2006, https://www. khaleejtimes.com/business/dlc-will-have-labour-village. 20. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics. Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 123. 21. “Tax system,” CMS, accessed May 3, 2022, https://cms.law/en/rus/publication/ doing-business-in-russia-2020/tax-system/incentives. 22. “World Port City,” Business in Antwerp, accessed April 13, 2022, https://­ businessinantwerp.eu/sectors/logistics

102  Forms of Urbanity 23. Marc Levinson, The Box. How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 401. 24. Ibid. 25. Tadeáš Říha, “Some Dystopias,” in Steel Cities: The Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha, and Martin Špičák (Zurich: Park Books AG, 2019), 26. 26. Tadeáš Říha, “Asphalt, Concrete, and Other Rocks: A Natural History of Logistics,” in Steel Cities: The Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha, and Martin Špičák (Zurich: Park Books AG, 2019), 108. 27. Daniel Šitera, “Transition Redux: Warehousing in Europe’s Westernmost East,” in Steel Cities: The Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha, and Martin Špičák (Zurich: Park Books AG, 2019), 186. 28. Ina Valkanova, “Who Builds the Steel Cities? On the Relationship between Finance, Law, and Industrial Zones in CEE,” in Steel Cities: The Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha, and Martin Špičák (Zurich: Park Books AG, 2019), 205. 29. Ibid., 207. 30. “About CTPark Bor,” CTPark Bor, accessed April 28, 2022, https://www.ctp.eu/ industrial-warehouse-office-finder/czech-republic/ctpark-bor/. 31. Kateřina Frejlachová, “Landscape with Warehouses: Tachov Region, West Bohemia,” in Steel Cities: The Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe, eds. Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha, and Martin Špičák (Zurich: Park Books AG, 2019), 77. 32. Šitera, “Transition Redux,” 183. 33. Jörn Boewe and Johannes Schulten, “Amazon Strikes in Europe: Seven Years of Industrial Action, Challenges, and Strategies,” in The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, eds. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 539. 34. Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, 180. 35. Alana Semuels, “How Amazon Helped Kill a Seattle Tax on Business,” The Atlantic, June 13, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/ how-amazon-helped-kill-a-seattle-tax-on-business/562736/. 36. Katie Wilson, “Company Town: What Happens to a City and Its Democracy When Amazon Dominates?,” in The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy, eds. Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 400. 37. Ingrid Burrington, “Mapping the Amazon,” The Architect’s Newspaper 17, no. 3 (April 2019): 29. 38. Ibid., 30. 39. Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, 98. 40. “About Walmart,” Walmart, accessed May 18, 2022, https://corporate.­ walmart.com/about#:~:text=Walmart%20International%20has%20more% 20than,and%20more%20throughout%20the%20world. 41. Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics, Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 138. 42. Ibid., 140. 43. Ibid., 210. 44. Ibid., 196.

Figure 5.1 Stefano Corbo, Life and Death in the EXTERIORLESS IV, 2022. Courtesy: © Stefano Corbo

5

Afterword

November 26, 2021. Copenhagen, Denmark, 10 am. Two kind gentlemen welcome me to the DigiPlex Data Center. Node in a network of several other data centers scattered across Northern Europe, this Copenhagen’s building is to some extent unusual, if compared to the fortified and inaccessible character of similar facilities described in the previous chapters. There is no secret here: the building is a four-story high structure with more than 1,600 m 2 area available for server rooms. Five fiber entries equip the building, whose power is provided with renewable hydro and wind energy sources. The last floor of the data center accommodates offices, although the entire facility would only need one personnel to make sure that the machines run smoothly and that no disruption is taking place. In my visit, I’m introduced to Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) batteries, diesel generators, cooling towers, and chillers. In walking around the spaces of this data center, one word continues to be evoked: transparency. The north façade of the building, in fact, consists of glass panels that emerge out of a thick concrete base. Even if data are stored in the internal core of the structure and cannot be visible from the exterior, at the DigiPlex Data Center, transparent is the process through which big and small companies can rent their own server spaces; transparent is how the facility manages energy sources; transparent is the interface between the building and the larger context of the city. DigiPlex is located in the city center, perfectly connected through public transportation, and only 10 minutes away from the airport. In its simple but honest layout, the design and functioning of the DigiPlex Data Center are revealing: they prove that data-related facilities can be active components of the city fabric while their image doesn’t have to necessarily communicate inaccessibility, distance, and mystery. Most importantly, the DigiPlex Data Center is a metaphor of the constraints, and also of the possibilities that the EXTERIORLESS presents to us. Through the pages of this book, we traveled all over the world, from Shenzhen to Rotterdam, stopping by in Arkansas and in Czech Republic. In our explorations, we could not only analyze a wide range of episodes that cross different scales – shipping containers, International-standard Class A warehouses, logistics parks – but we could also investigate the impact that DOI: 10.4324/9781003251736-5

Afterword 105 some forms of urbanity produce over the surroundings by dramatically altering the built environment and their social and cultural fabric. In its variety, the attempt of this book was to map the global entanglement of types, building typologies, and processes of urbanization characterizing the current phase of capitalist development. At first sight, what emerges from this journey is a dark and hopeless scenario, which seems to confirm what Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes about four urgent problems that contemporary societies have to address: the ecological catastrophe, the illegitimate extension of private property rights to intellectual property, techno-scientific development, and new forms of apartheid, reflected in the proliferation of walls and slums.1 The EXTERIORLESS, in fact, is oftentimes synonym with violence, oppression, inequalities, and environmental destruction. The EXTERIORLESS highlights capitalism: it reinforces its contradictions, exacerbates its tensions and its desires – see the struggle between humans and machines represented by automation. The spatial models through which the EXTERIORLESS manifests itself are the ideological models through which capitalist production (and consumption) shapes forms of subjectivity because in ‘neoliberal capitalism the subject is ever more excluded from the exercise of even the limited forms of reason with which capitalism is concerned.’2 Also, the EXTERIORLESS has gained centrality in moments of cultural and political sterility, as no real forms of antagonist thought has resisted the postmodern wave that spread over the Western world starting the 1980s. In other words, the EXTERIORLESS has found an open and obstacle-free corridor to venture through. In this respect, in order to describe the context in which the EXTERIORLESS operates, one could borrow the words used by Mark Fisher when talking about his idea of capitalist realism, as a ‘pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.’3 Yet, starting from this apparently dramatic scenario, the EXTERIORLESS can also tell us something about the future – a future of communal and critical participation. In its articulations, the EXTERIORLESS tells us about militarism, biopolitics, architectural genericity and spectacle, technology, and cultural values. Its contradictions prove that any reaction to the status quo cannot simply consist in boycotting or refusing technological development, nor in imagining naïve forms of individual activism that are disconnected from an accurate and stratified analysis of the current modes of production. There are possibly two directions to rethink the EXTERIORLESS and, by consequence, to interject larger issues: to revise the role that architecture plays in the current context of capitalist development, and to deconstruct the processes of subjectivation triggered by the EXTERIORLESS in light of a new alliance between human and non-­human agents. Much has been said or written about the role of the architect in contemporary societies – their progressive decline from being a public

106  Afterword intellectual, fully engaged in societal dynamics, to an undermined professional figure whose generalized ambition is to simply describe a certain reality, rather than actively intervening on it. The processes of privatization initiated in the 1980s have, in fact, radically changed the social relevance of the architect, and their possibility to contribute to the res publica. If looking beyond the generic spatialities of the EXTERIORLESS, and focusing on the contemporary architectural production, one could agree on what Nadir Lahiji writes in his Architecture Manifesto: ‘architecture is today principally composed of aesthetic counterfeits that overexpose it to sensual gratification.’4 Since 1980s, the role of the architect has become every day more marginal and marginalized: by acknowledging and celebrating reality as it is, generations of architects have begun to use words such as innovation, creativity, or experience, to simply satisfy the demands of private actors – see the debate between critical and projective culture initiated in 2002 by Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting in their seminal essay Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism, originally published in Perspecta.5 If, according to the authors, for a long time architecture had been conceived in terms of autonomy – implying critique, representation, and signification – a paradigm shift was taking place at the dawn of the twenty-first century, represented by an interest in instrumentality – projection, performativity, and pragmatics. As seen before, from a disciplinary perspective, Douglas Spencer associates this moment in time with the translation of Gilles Deleuze’s thinking into architectural forms, which has produced an emphasis on fields, materials, or affect, like in the case of Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s focus on the envelope. But of course other factors have to be taken into consideration: for instance, advancement in digital technologies. Free forms had originally meant, for someone, free societies. In reality, this naïve assumption has then translated into the equation, free forms = free individuals – the cultural conditio sine qua non of neoliberalism. Criticality was gradually replaced by the vague definition of ‘new,’ as seen in Chapter 2. In chasing innovation and free forms, architecture turned into a commodity, and its practitioners into cheap labor force, being flexibility, nomadism, and spontaneity not only architectural challenges but also the very hallmarks of management in a post-Fordist society. To recognize the marginalization of the architect in relation to broader processes of urban transformation, as well as to fully acknowledge their condition of exploited labor force, is probably the first step to rethink the role of architecture at large. In this respect, groups such as the Architecture Lobby have started examining work conditions in the field of the architecture profession to denounce abuses and inequalities. If for years we have read architecture and the city in terms of flow, smoothness, and circulation, perhaps it is time not only to observe how these phenomena occur but also to think of how we can contrast them. To the architecture of neoliberalism, – and of the EXTERIORLESS – we can

Afterword 107 respond by revealing struggles, contradictions, or antagonist visions. But that is probably not enough; what is necessary is also to build a corpus of ideas that could blow away forever the word innovation and replace it with the word futures. Futures in the sense of plural and inclusive scenarios are not here yet. Aesthetic explorations should be accompanied with political contents, not for the sake of pursuing individual forms of expression, but for the possibility to address those urgent issues Slavoj Žižek is talking about. The other aspect through which the EXTERIORLESS can offer a way out to the status quo has to do with the possibility of a positive biopolitics, in the sense of a renovated relationship between individuals and collectivity, citizens and forms of power. As seen throughout the pages of this book, labor in its multiple manifestations – human labor, human-machine labor, automated labor – is the terrain of confrontation for different instances. Recent cases of workers mobilization, happening in port areas and warehouses all around the world, are paving the way for organizational models that can disrupt the logic of smoothness required by the logistics chain and can revise the mechanisms of social control intrinsic to those systems. Disruption can take different shapes: strikes, protests, and pirate attacks. In 2011, ‘6000 Suez Canal workers at five service companies initiated a wildcat strike in the cities of Suez, Port Said, and Ismailia. Dock workers stopped work at the key port of Al Ain Sokhna, disrupting Egypt’s vital sea links to the Far East.’6 In California, for days, workers protested against deaths on port docks associated with demands for higher productivity. Not only protests, but also actions at the chokepoints. Chokepoints are areas or maritime passages where typically shipping cargos have to slow down in order to pass through narrower corridors on the way to their final destinations. More specifically, chokepoints can be straits or ports – ideal terrains to hijack the speed of circulation and create disruption. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, some of the 2011 Occupy activities included counter-logistical tactics at the port chokepoints. Since then, a logistics think tank has been initiated to envision new forms of protest, in order to reconfigure a socially just supply chain. To govern global spaces of flow means building an architecture of security whose techniques and byproducts have military implications, as seen previously. The so-called supply chain security includes data collection, surveillance, and labor discipline. This is why, over the last years, governments and corporations have been busy to implement systems that could limit or reduce to zero the possibility of disruption to circulation. Among them is the so-called International Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC), a shipping route through the Gulf of Aden that is internationally patrolled in order to protect ships from possible pirate attacks. This zone is apparently invisible: no flags, no signs of territorial authority. Shipping companies which transit the zone are encouraged to register their vessels through the IRTC platform. Multinational military forces police the waters to protect global circulation

108  Afterword of goods. Nevertheless, despite the extreme forms of policing, workers’ strategies and tactics of protest are still proliferating. While in the short term all of the actions mentioned above have proved to be extremely successful in order to address urgent labor questions, their relevance in the long term can even be more impactful. The actions taking place at the core of the EXTERIORLESS – its logistics chain – are in fact revealing the interconnected character of our world and, also, are acknowledging the need for a positive biopolitics, according to which, as pointed out by Roberto Esposito, subjectivity is not simply an individual dimension that enters social and economic relationships. A positive biopolitics rethinks the role itself of politics and its relationship with life – a politics that views life not as its object but as its subject. Such a shift cannot occur individually, but only through a long and patient collective effort of re-centering humans from an individual to a participative dimension. Architecture can play an active role in that by configuring itself as a critical form of knowledge first, and then by materializing in space the richness and diversity of those communitarian instances that our societies can express.

Notes 1. Nadir Lahiji, An Architecture Manifesto (New York: Routledge, 2019), 174. 2. Douglas Spencer, “Out of the Loop,” Volume, no. 49 (September 2016): 8. 3. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: O Books, 2009), 16. 4. Lahiji, An Architecture Manifesto, 197. 5. See Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta, no. 33 (2002): 72–77. 6. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics. Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 119.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics denote figures. 12 Città Ideali 35 Abu Ghraib 57 Adecco 92 Aden 66, 89, 107 Adjaye, D. 91 Agamben, G. 14–16 Airbnb 54 Akademgorodok 91 Al Ain Sokhna 107 Alibaba 76 Alimahomed-Wilson, J. xviii, 2, 12 Alle ist Architektur 37 Amazon: business model 2–3, 10–12, 68–69, 82, 86; data 54–55, 72, 73, 76, 77; forms of urbanity 92, 96, 97–99, 100; logistics xix, xxi, 94–95; and warehouses xi, xv, 61, 66 Amazon Web Services 54, 69, 76, 77, 98 Anaheim 85 ANNEX xix, 70, 72 Anthropocene xii–xiv, xxi Antwerp 91 AP Møller-Maersk 65 Apple 3, 39, 54, 76 Architecture Manifesto 106 Archizoom xvii, 26, 29, 32–33, 35, 36 Arkansas xx, 68, 99, 100, 104 Arlington 98 Arrighi, G. 4–6 Arup 91 Banham, R. 30 Basra 56, 57 Basra Gateway Terminal 57

Basra Logistics City 57 Bayonne xix, 64 Benjamin, W. 15 Bentonville xx, 68, 99, 100 Berardi, F. 12 Berger, A. 52–53 Bernaskoni, B. 91 Biden, J. 55 Bilbao 9, 47 Bilbao effect 9 Bilò, F. 42 Biopolitics xvi, 13–18, 105, 107–108 Blow-out Village 32 Boewe, J. 94 Boltanski, L. 25 bonded logistics parks (BLP) 89 Boston xv Branzi, A. 33, 81 Bratton, B.H. 12–13, 18, 22–24 Braudel, F. 4 Brenner, N. 53, 81–82 Bretton Woods 5 Brno 94 Buckley, C. 37 Bulgaria 93 Burrington, I. 98 Bush, G.W. 15 Cam Ranh Bay 63 Camp Bucca 57 Capital One 54 Capitalocene xiii–xiv, xxi Carteret 74 Casa da Música 47 Castells, M. 81 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) 92–94

110  Index Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 11, 54 Chelsea 8 Chen, X. 89 Chiapello, E. 25 Chicago 62, 74, 98 Chicago Mercantile Exchange 74 CIAM 45 Cincinnati 62 CISCO Systems 85 Class A warehouses 36, 67, 93, 104 Coca-Cola 54 Continuous Monument xvii Cook, P. 28, 29 Copenhagen 89, 104 The Cost of Free Shipping. Amazon in the Global Economy 2 Coward, M. xiv–xv Cowen, D. 57, 65, 95 Crompton, D. 28, 35 CTPark Bor 88, 93–94 Cuomo, A. 98 Cuppini, N. 58 Cushicle 28, 32 Cushman & Wakefield 92 Czech Republic xxi, 88, 93, 94, 104 Dardot, P. xi Davies, P. 31 de Blasio, B. 98 de Portzamparc, C. 9 Deleuze, G. 14, 21 Deleuzism 24–25, 44 Delirious New York 40, 41 DigiPlex Data Center 104 Disney World 84–85 Disneyland 84–85 Dobrovíz 94 Domain Awareness System (DAS) 54 Domus Magazine 40 Doraleh 66 Downtown Athletic Club 40–41, 42 dromology 83–84 Dropbox 54 Dubai 65–66, 82, 90–91 Dubai Health Care City 90 Dubai Industrial City 90 Dubai International City 90 Dubai Internet City 90 Dubai Knowledge Village 90 Dubai Logistics City 66, 90–91 Dubai Maritime City 90 Dubai Media City 90 Dubai Port Authority 66

Dubai Ports World 66 Dubai Silicon Oasis 90 Dubai Techno Park 90 Duisburg 92 Easterling, K. xiv, 15, 22, 90 Egypt 107 Employee Hours Tax 97 Entanglement xix, 70, 72 Esposito, R. xvi, 14, 16–18, 108 Euralille 39, 43 exopolis 84–85 export-processing zones (EPZ) 89 exurban investment mats 8 Facebook xiv, 3, 54, 72 Fayetteville-Rogers-Springdale xx Fin de Siècle: OMA Rem Koolhaas 40 finance capitalism: xiv, 5–7, 8–9 financial icons 8–9 Fisher, M. 105 Florence 5, 35 Ford, H. 3 Fordism 3, 5, 33, 82 Foucault, M. 16 Foxconn xvii, 92 France-Lanord, A. 75 Frapporti, M. 58 free ports 89, 91 free zone (FZ) 66, 89, 90 free-trade zones (FTZ) 59, 86, 89 French Institute of Architecture 40 Fulfillment. Winning and Losing in One-click America 12 Fun Palace 30–31, 35 Future Systems 47 Gallup 7 Gans, H. 81 Gaza 86 Gdansk 89 Gehry, F. 9, 47 General Motors 3 Genoa 5, 35, 89 Genoa Airport 35 Germany 52, 76, 92, 93, 94 Google: data 54, 72, 73, 76; expanded domains 56; forms of urbanity 88; and surveillance capitalism xiv, 3, 25 The Great Powers 14 Greenfield, A. 86 Greenpeace 55 Griffiths, S. 31 Guggenheim Museum 9, 47

Index 111 Hadid, Z. 24 Hainan 89 Hamburg 89 Hardt, M. 14 Haussmann, G.E. 84 Heidegger, M. 15 Herzog & de Meuron 47, 91 Hitler, A. 15, 84 Hofmann 92 Hollein, H. 37 Home Depot 53 Hong Kong 5, 9, 65, 76, 89 Houston 62 HQ2 97–98 Huawei 85 Hudson Yards 98 Hungary 93 Hutchison 65 IBM 30, 85, 86 iceberg homes 8 Icebergs, Zombies, and the Ultra Thin 6 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 11 Ingersoll, R. 43 Instant City 35 Institute for City Logistics 95 International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 36, 63 International Political Science Association 14 International Recommended Transit Corridor (IRTC) 107 Israel 96 Jebel Ali 65–66, 90 JESSICA (Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas) 93, 94 Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) 54 Julius Caesar xviii Kallipoliti, L. 48 Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone 89 Karachi 66 Karlsruhe 42–43 Keynesianism 5, 82 Khalili, L. 62 KIVA Systems xv Kjellén, R. 14 Knightsbridge 8

Koolhaas, R.: Bigness xvii, 26, 40–45; discipline 36; and envelope 47, 48 Krippner, G.R. 7 Kroger 97 Kufan Group 57 Laakdal 91 Lahiji, N. 106 Laval, C. xi Leatherbarrow, D. 46 LeCavalier, J. 48, 55, 68, 100 Lefebvre, H. 21, 82 Lille 39, 43 Littlewood, J. 30 Livorno 89 Logistics Management Institute (LMI) 58 Long Island City 98 Los Angeles 62, 74, 91, 98 Loudoun County 77 Lübekck 89 Lufthansa 93 Lynn, G. 24 Maasvlakte 2 xix, 61, 64 MacGillis, A. 12 Malaysia 62 Manhattan xix, 9, 40–44, 64, 86, 98 Marine Steel Corporation 62 Marseille 89 Marullo, F. xviii Masdar City 85 Massimo, F. 69 Mastrigli, G. 40 Matta, R. 37 Mayfair 8 McDonald 53 McDonald County 55, 77 McLean, M.P. 62–63, 65 Microsoft 3, 54, 72, 76, 85 Milan 5, 32 Missouri 55, 77 Moneo, R. 43 Moore, C. 84 Moore, J.W. xiii Moscow Smart City 85 Mostafavi, M. 46 Moussavi, F. 24 Naples 89 Nasdaq 74 National Security Agency (NSA) 11 Nayar, P.K. 9–10, 78 Negri, A. xvi, 14–16

112  Index New Babylon xvii, 34–35 New Songdo 85 The New Spirit of Capitalism 25 New York City: Amazon xxi, 95, 97–99; data 54; Manhattan 9, 40–41; and logistics 57, 62, 87 New York Police Department 54 Newark 62 News Corp 54 Nieuwenhuys, C. 34 No-Stop City xvii, 33 nobili vecchi 6 North West Arkansas xx Northern Gulf Partners 57 Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism 106 OMA 39, 40, 42, 44 One Wilshire 74 Orange County 84 Oschwald, C. 76 Palestinian Authority 86 Panattoni 92 Parc de la Villette 42 Paris 40, 42, 43, 84 Pask, G. 30 Persian Gulf 57, 65 Perspecta 106 Piketty, T. 6–7 Pionen White Mountain 75 Plug-in City 29 Poland xxi, 93, 94 Port Rashid 65–66 Postscript on Societies of Control 21 Prada Tokyo 47 Price, C. xvii, 26, 27, 30–31, 35, 36 Primark 92, 93–94 Prologis 92 Rabanne, P. 37 Randstad 92 Reese, E. xviii, 2, 11, 12 Reiser + Umemoto 24 The Revenge of the Real 13 Rhine 92 Říha, T. 92 Rio de Janeiro 53, 85 Romania 94 Rome 4 Rostock 89

Rotterdam xix, 61, 64–65, 94, 104 The Rule of Logistics 68 S,M,L,XL 40 Sadler, S. 31, 32 Samsung 85 San Francisco Bay Area 107 Sassen, S. xx, 82–83 Saunders, W.S. 43–44 Scannell, R. J. 54 Schmid, C. 53 Schmitt, C. 15 Schulten, J. 94 Science Industrial Parks 90 Scott Brown, D. 37 SeaLand 63, 65–66 Seattle xxi, 47, 96, 97 Seattle Public Library 47 Sebregondi, F. 86 Seigel, J. xiv Selfridges Department Store 47 Shantou 89 Shenzhen Special Economic Zone 89 Silicon Valley 25 Singapore 5, 76–77, 87, 89 Šitera, D. 93 Skolkovo 91 Slovakia xxi, 93, 94 Soho 99 Soja, E.W. 84 Somol, R. 106 The Soul at Work 12 Soules, M. xiv, 6–9 special economic zone 85, 89 Spencer, D. 24–25, 32, 44, 47, 106 Spread Networks 74 Spuybroek, L. 24 The Stack 22–24 Starbucks 97 The State as a Form of Life 14 state of exception 15 Staten Island 87, 95, 98 Steel Cities xxi, 86, 93–95 Struna, J. 11 Suez Canal 65, 107 Suitaloon 32 super-podiums 8 Superstudio xvii, 26, 29, 35–36, 37, 38 Supersuperficie 35 surveillance capitalism 3–4, 11, 55 Swiss Fort Knox 75–76

Index 113 Tantlinger, K. 63 Thatcher, M. 32 Trieste xv Turkey 93 U.S. Federal Reserve 5 Ukraine 94 ultra-thin pencil towers 8–9 Umm Qasr 56, 57 United Arab Emirates 85 United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) 59 urban enterprise zones 89 Venice xix, 5, 70, 72, 89 Venice Architecture Biennale xix, 70, 72 Venlo 92 Venturi, R. 37 Verizon 54 Vermont xx, 86, 99–100 Vietnam 5, 63 Virilio, P. 83 Vitruvius xviii Volkswagen 84, 93 Vulcan 97

Waldheim, C. 52–53 Walmart: business model 53, 55, 66–68; data 77; and forms of urbanity xix–xx, 82, 86, 99–100 Walton, S. 99 Weimar’s Constitution 15 Whiting, S. 106 Whole Foods 69, 98 World Bank xviii Xiamen 89 Xiaoping, D. 89 Young, L. xi, 75 Zaera-Polo, A. 24, 44–48, 106 Zayo Group Holdings, Inc. 74 Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) 42–43 Zhengzhou xvii Zhuhai 89 Žižek, S. 105, 107 Zuboff, S. 3–4, 11