Territory as Interior: Flatbed Junk

Architecture As Measure, Archive, Contributors, Densities, Essay, expanding design practices, Formats, Neyran Turan, No Density, Territory and mobility, Topics.

Architecture, Cities, Courtyard, Data storage, Desert, Essay, Globalization, History of Architecture, Industrial context, Infrastructure, Landscape, New Ecologies.

This essay is an excerpt of Architecture as Measure by Neyran Turan. Published by Actar Publishers

Dave Lee, “Inside Tesla’s Gigantic Gigafactory,” BBC News, July 27, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36893104.

The literature on the topic of the interior is too vast to include here. For a critical introduction and discussion on Walter Benjamin, see Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (New York: Routledge, 2007). Also see Mark Pimlott, Without and Within: Essays on Territory and the Interior (Rotterdam: Episode, 2007); and Pimlott, The Public Interior as Idea and Project (Heijningen: Jap Sam Books, 2016). For a general discussion on the eighteen-century origins of the interior, see Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). For the eighteenth-century “developed surface drawing,” see Robin Evans, “The Developed Surface: An Enquiry into the Brief Life of an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Technique,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), 195–231. Also see Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beate Söntgen, eds., Interiors and Interiority (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); and, David Gissen, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment and Urban Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

For more on the idea of “planetary urbanization,” see Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “Planetary Urbanisation,” in Urban Constellations, ed. Matthew Gandy (Berlin: Jovis, 2011), 10−14; and Neil Brenner, “The Hinterland, Urbanised?” Architectural Design 86 (July/August 2016): 118−27.

See, for instance, Steve Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001).

For more on the topic, see Denis Cosgrove, “Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo Space Photographs,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, no. 2 (June 1994): 270–94.

Buckminster Fuller, “Architect as World Planner,” Architectural 
Design (August 1961): 235.

See Stuart Elden, “Missing the Point: Globalization, Deterritorialization and the Space of the World,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (March 2005): 8–19. Also see Ross Exo Adams, Circulation and Urbanization (London: SAGE Publications, 2019).

Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären III: Schäume (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004), 11–29.

Andrea Branzi, Open Enclosures (Paris: Fondation Cartier, 2008), unpaginated.

Andrea Branzi writes: “‘The city without architecture’ is the city whose functions no longer occur through the devices of architecture, but now occur through systems of electronic instruments, products, information, and above all through the componential approach to interior design, which permits the re-functionalization of its interior spaces in real time. This is, therefore, a city whose external image no longer corresponds to the activities carried out in its internal spaces; such activities are now done in an independent fashion, separated from the architectural backdrop.” Branzi, “City Without Architecture,” in Weak and Diffuse Modernity: The World of Projects at the Beginning of the 21st Century (Milan: Skira, 2006), 69.

Andrea Branzi, “New York Waterfront: Architecture as New Territories,” in Weak and Diffuse Modernity, 91. See also Branzi, “Progetto Manhattan Waterfront,” Domus 696 (July/August 1988): 1–2.

Branzi, “New York Waterfront,” 91. On this project, Branzi also writes: “We want, in fact, to furnish the banks of Manhattan for the new frontiers of the third millennium: a great horizontal platform open to sun, that emits signs towards skies, representing man living in the artificial nature of New York in the twenty-first century, a sign like that of the Statue of Liberty, which for this century has represented America to the world.” Andrea Branzi, Andrea Branzi: Complete Works (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 177.

Hito Steyerl, “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition,” e-Flux 72 (2016), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60480/a-sea-of-data-apophenia-and-pattern-mis-recognition. Also related would be Steyerl, “Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” e-Flux 24 (2011), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective. For a thorough exploration of the historical construction of vision and cognition in relation to data in the second half of the twentieth century, see Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). For reflections on the implications of computer vision on visuality and space, see Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images: Your Pictures Are Looking at You,” Architectural Design: Machine Landscapes 89, no. 1 (January/February 2019): 22–7. Also see Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); and Steve Anderson, Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).

See Christina Lodder, “Malevich, Suprematism and Aerial Photography,” History of Photography 28, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 25–40. See also Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1959). For a thorough elaboration on the relationship between aerial photography and French urban planning in the mid-twentieth century, see Jeanne Haffner, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Also see Mitchell Schwarzer, Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 118–63; Mark Dorrian and Frederic Pousin, eds., Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013); and Sonja Duempelmann, Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).

In the summer of 2014, construction was started in the Nevada desert on what was announced to be the largest building in the world when completed. With a footprint of 10 million square feet, the building was to be named the Gigafactory, a production facility to provide lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and home energy storage for the Tesla company.[1] With its 1.9 million square feet completed at the time of this book’s publication, the manufacturing floor of this already massive factory is a landscape for the automated workforce of machines and robots that sits within the vast desert landscape of the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, the largest industrial park in the United States. Thinking of this colossal factory and many other giant air-conditioned interiors—of fulfilment centers, data centers, self-storage buildings and assembly plants—sited mostly in the unpopulated areas of the low-human-density hinterlands, one can contend that their interior space has swallowed the earth.