INFRATECTURE. The Problem of Quantity.

[2M2] THE PROBLEM OF QUANTITY.

Warehouse Technology is indeed a two-faced animal; one side offers delicious promises of speed and freedom (Futurism), and the other gives us alienation and instability ("All that is solid melts into air..."). Technology feeds on itself, giving us more speed, more tools, and more opportunities, more and more often; hence, the problem of quantity. The spatial consequences of quantity are obvious. Today, networks are broader, buffer zones are wider, and areas allocated for temporary storage (parking lots, container yards) are larger than ever before. How, then, will our cities meet our demands for accessibility as they expand further away from us? Furthermore, how can cities (and technologies) become more comprehensible and easier to use while they grow more complex? We can only answer these questions if we understand the interdependencies between mobility and proximity, and project means for their successful physical implementation.

As a result of the spatial consequences of quantity, the sprawling, uncontrollable megalopolis that we call the post-industrial city is an atomized, fragmented, and incomprehensible organism. Peter Papademetriou offers this explanation of Houston: "Characteristic of the new city are the dynamics of growth, change, and an expanded scale of space and time. Houston as a totality is demanding because its very boundaries exist at a dimension greater than simple human experience."⁷⁷ One is reminded of Roger Caillois’ "psychasthenic" subject, who feels engulfed by space, unable to discern his/her place within it, and therefore cannot distinguish between the limits of his/her body and of space. With regard to this disabling agoraphobia, we have no choice but to address the new city on its own terms. Papademetriou says that "in the spread-out environment of relatively low density which the evolving city has become, the nature of these patterns of association demands an expansion of personal consciousness."⁷⁸

Warehouse Roof

The new city poses a number of challenges to architects. Developments are characteristically greater in scale, with a higher level of complexity, than ever before. Furthermore, time-frames for project execution are shorter than ever before. Architects, who are by nature at odds with the notion of quantity, have had a pathetically minimal role in shaping the new city. It is instead the territory of the developer, the bureaucrat, and the engineer. The results are, as one can easily see, mediocre at best.

The post-industrial city is home to a new type of building. It is structurally simple, largely prefabricated, inexpensive, and relatively flexible. More importantly, it is big. In a lecture made at Rice University in 1991, Rem Koolhaas observed the following:

In a building beyond a certain size, the scale becomes so enormous and the distance between center and perimeter, or core and skin, becomes so vast that the exterior can no longer hope to make any precise disclosure about the interior. In other words, the humanist relationship between exterior and interior, based upon an expectation that the exterior will make certain disclosures and revelations about the interior, is broken. The two become completely autonomous, separate projects, to be pursued independently, with no apparent connection.

The second characteristic of this new, mutant scale of architecture if the fact that within such a building, the distances between one component and another, between one programmatic entity and another, also become so enormous that there is an autonomy of independence of spatial elements.⁷⁹

Collection of Warehouses A year later, in his investigation of the port of Yokohama in 1992, Koolhaas wrote, "At Minato Mirai we saw the emergence of a particular building typology, one we will soon have to recognize as the dominant typology: a completely inarticulate container with no architectural pretensions, whose only purpose is to accommodate certain processes or offices, and which simply represents a massive quantity of square meters imposed on an urban site without any more positive contribution."⁸⁰ This is precisely the new typology I have been addressing. With few differences, it is the same throughout the world. The circumstances for development in new enterprise zones such as Minato Mirai are conducive for this type of building; it is fast, cheap, and easy.

In his evaluation of the Alliance Development north of Fort Worth, where this typology is ubiquitous, Mark Wamble posits that "it is possible to think of a building as having an interior without an exterior."⁸¹ He uses the electronic/biological metaphor of "the circuit and the cell" to describe a new territory of architectural potential, in which one could conceptualize "a vast interior landscape of cells according to the circuitry of an even larger field of activity."⁸² This metaphor proposes a rethinking of Hilberseimer’s cell within a condition of interiority. The resulting strategy is "to develop the cells – each extra-small by comparison to the overall structure – without an imageable relationship to the whole... the objective [is] to develop the relationship between the cellular disposition of the interior as a work environment, and the operative circuitry of its global terrain."⁸³ Such an approach necessitates the ability to comprehend a multiplicity of scales within the spatiotemporal framework of the enterprise zone – a true challenge for the average architect.

⁷⁷Papademetriou, Peter, Houston, an Architectural Guide (American Institute of Architects, 1972) p. 1

⁷⁸Ibid., p. 2

⁷⁹Koolhaas, Rem, Rem Koolhaas: Conversations with Students (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996) p. 15-16

⁸⁰Koolhaas, Rem, "Programmatic Lava" in S, M, L, XL (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1995) p. 1216

⁸¹Wamble, Mark, "The Circuit and the Cell" (unpublished)

⁸²Ibid.

⁸³Ibid.

A Master's Thesis in Architecture at Rice University by Blaine Brownell.