New Logistical Pacts- New Affiliations
Location: Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn U.S
Typology: Logistical Infrastructures
Year & Sem: 2024 - Summer
Collaborators: Santhosh Narayanan ( GSAPP - Summer studio)
Have you ever wondered how a product miraculously appears on your doorstep just hours after you place an order? What happens inside the large, blank warehouses that have sprung up in our neighbourhoods? Have you noticed Amazon labour protests for better working conditions and fair wages? Ever felt that the product you’ve been eyeing suddenly pops up as ads on social media, as if the internet is watching you with an algorithmic gaze?
These seemingly mundane thoughts point to deeper issues we often overlook. During my summer studio at GSAPP, these questions became the foundation of our investigation into the inherently political nature of logistical infrastructures. Logistics encompasses several trajectories crucial to questions of architecture, urbanization, and the built environment. Amazon’s physical presence, known as the "fulfillment network," reflects the vast scope of its operations, integrating individual consumption patterns into a complex network facilitated by data-driven technologies.
Flux Navigator,
The cosmogram explores how logistical forces like Amazon accelerate the flow of goods with significant implications. The first rings show the cycles of " "Flow of Goods." The second ring displays the architectural devices enabling the flux. The third ring shows the events transpiring from these devices, and the last ring analyzes the events with data. The cosmogram allowed us to escape time traps, navigating and comparing events from the past to the future.
Couduit - Surfaces - Containers :
Conduit utilizes Amazon’s excess vehicles and abandoned infrastructure, networking these resources to create parasitic entities that activate open spaces and neighborhoods. Projects like the "Shredder" convert on-site plastic waste into sheets, marking our wastefulness.
The second proposal, Toxic Bath, addresses Gowanus, where several clean-up missions, often driven by capitalist motives, have taken place. The Toxic Bath is a performative event that rearticulates infrastructure to collect and filter water, creating a small pool for safe swimming amidst surrounding toxicity—an enacted activism to resituate water pollution in the public consciousness.
Lastly, the Moving Garden proposal addresses the sterile outlook of Amazon’s distribution facilities and the ignored ecological threats. It uses conveyor systems and automation to study and care for plants, bringing attention to the material witnesses of ecological damage, previously confined to distant labs.
Logistics registers several trajectories relevant to questions of architecture, urbanization, and the built environment. My studio investigation ultimately exemplifies the agency of architects over these emergent infrastructures, which act as capitalist agents accelerating growth while destabilizing ecological systems. If left unaddressed, this system becomes a capitalist machine for consumption. It is crucial that we, as architects, acknowledge and engage with these systems to positively influence the asymmetric balance and stabilize the impending apocalypse.
“Infrastructure is much more important than architecture.” – Rem Koolhaas
