http://www.sourcemap.org/
Hack the finite logic of emerging logistical cities in its given expanded playing fields and finite plays; infinite campaigns to follow. Engage in the flow of rules and logics in the playing fields of exchange; for these finite wins and losses accumulate to the infinite plays. Then we too might exercise our role as synthesizer and bearer of variance to the fullest in the many streaming narratives. Hack the logic of logistics.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Underground Storage of Thesis Projects
Hacking big ice boxes is tougher than expected. Two maneuvers are of worth consideration for this thesis.
First, despite the explicit rules imposed by a storage facility for tight efficiencies of space, every site and architecture must have unexpected consequences or byproducts as a result of these rules. After all, no generated spreadsheet for the planning of a new storage facility can possibly account for every cost or benefit. At best, these logistical regimes default to coping mechanisms of categorically placing these very unknown variables in insurance terms of "contingencies" or "acts of god". The small details that are left out of this planning equation is where architect as hacker needs to be looking at closely.
As of now, byproducts that are worth considering at the architectural level:
- Emissions from the mechanical systems that support the temperature controlled rooms
- Accumulations that are brought to the site via trucking and rail.
- Impervious surfaces and drainage of phosphorus.
Second, the code for formatting the spatial development of storage facilities resides in the faulty language of bureaucratic planning documents. Again, its rule making explicitness is prescribed in quantitative measures of x-feet above, below, or back from the street. This logic is buried in the bureaucratic pages of planning documents but inevitably physically manifests in the forms of setbacks and property lines staked into the ground. The legal loopholes of the language needs to be hacked, then a demonstration of the set of hacking tactics needs to be demonstrated (Alex Lehnerer's Grand Urban Rules or Sub Plan).
Underground Storage
Meanwhile, the default mode of hacking projects resort to program. The legacy of Dutch architects have taught us that its the program stupid! Tongue-in-cheek as these projects maybe, these projects have been successful in repurposing, infilling, and retrofitting of depleted or used up post-industrial sites seems to be in vogue. Pertaining to the thesis at hand are underground storage facilities cropping up in old limestone mines. The melting waters of ice age past and the coursing water of the Missouri set the stage for productive industrial sites of extraction. The activity continues, but not of the same intensity nor of the same locale. Its productive work resides in the network of gravel pits that pave way for the expanding suburban streets. The old sites of extraction becomes a relic of Fordist economies. In this case, the functional repurposing of a site of extraction into one of conveyance and accumulation of goods
Docking Area
If the thesis project was to employ the same kind of program centric tactic, it would look like the following equation:
Intermodal Distribution Center in Cold Commodities + ___(x-plus)
education
__tourism
shopping/dinning
_ recreation
__hotel _____________
All of the above mentioned x-plus that the supposed architect as agent brings to the table are tinged with a consumer culture of fetishizing the box. NeoMarxist critiques are powerful and hard to escape, something I don't think you can totally escape from, but if this thesis really is going to consider combining the topic of health, it needs to be worry about health becoming a derivative for a fast-serving IKEA of Health and Personal Health products and services on full spectacle.
Offices
This thesis project acknowledge program as a method, but aspires to hack without having to solely resort to such means.
Working Project Titles:
Cold Empires
The Cold Chain Complex
The Cold Chain Complex
Cold Chain Complex
ProtoPharmopia
Pharmopia
Pharmoplis
ProtoPharmopia
Pharmopia
Pharmoplis
Pharmacopic Follies
Pharmacopic Post
Mall Medica
Medi-log
Meditopia
Mecha-Medilistics
Mega Medical Stop
Mega Medical Exchange
Medi-Mart
Mega-Mini Mart
Medical Mechanica
MechaPharm
MechaPharm Logistics
Mecha-Medi-Mart
MechaPharm Logistics
Mecha-Medi-Mart
The Medi-market exchange
Medica's
Medilistic's
Medilistic's
Guns-Meds-Foods
The Cold Zone
The Cold Zone
Health Zone
The Ice Stop
The Ice Stop
The Health Stop
The Health Exchange
The Health Exchange
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Notes from Networked Cities
Universal Situated
anytime-anyplace | responsive place
anytime-anyplace | responsive place
mostly portable | mostly embedded
Ad hoc aggregation | Accumulated aggregation
context is location | context is activity
fast and far | slower and closer
uniform | adapted
-Malcolm McCullough
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
NAFTA as text
When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts.
-Christopher Hayes, in "The NAFTA Superhighway" The Nation, April 9. 2007
Monday, January 10, 2011
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Storage Wars
Architectural discourse isn't the only crowd of conversation fascinated by the flow of prized materials into the city. Reality television series Storage Wars, chronicles the quick hands and exchanges of locals that make their living off of scavenging what remains of the lost storage units put up for auctions.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
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