At some point in the next year or so,
Amazon’s payroll is going to be split 50/50
between flesh-and-blood and steel-and-
silicon. Amazon’s US operation employs
around 125,000 actual people, but it’s also
engaged in a ferocious expansion of its
robotic workforce, the kind that doesn’t need
paying, feeding, or the benefits of labour laws.
Right now, it has more than 100,000
robots in action around the world, with
the robotic systems geared up to take the
weight off the company’s flesh-and-blood
workers. Robotic arms stack and sort,
forklifts buzz along autonomously and puck-
like lifting robots bring shelves of goods
to the pickers, dancing a non-stop ballet
of logistical reorganisation. With around
75 depots in the US at least, and up to 3m
packages shipped around the world each day,
analysts at Deutsche Bank note that robot-
powered warehousing allows 50 per cent more
space for goods, saving around 20 per cent
on operating costs. You do the maths.How long though will robots remain in
supporting roles? And what does this mean
for the future of architecture? Rem Koolhaas
has called a potential (largely) post-human
infrastructure ‘a new frontier that hasn’t been
argued about’. Million square foot structures
are increasingly common, and the simple fact
is this: as businesses scale up, human input
gets smaller. China’s mega-retailer Alibaba is
investing heavily in robotic and AI, chasing
Amazon’s efficiencies. And while Tesla might
need a few thousand workers for its new
multibillion-dollar Gigafactory in Nevada,
they’ll be rattling around a building that’s
already 465,000 sq m and only 30 per cent
completed. The UK’s Health and Safety
Executive recommends that each worker has
around 11 cubic metres of space (say an area
of around 5 sq m) but The Wall Street Journal
notes that a typical e-commerce warehouse
might employ one person per every 92 sq m.
Given the ever-increasing space devoted
to sorting, shipping, even crop growing,
energy generation and data storage, Koolhaas’
frontier lands are upon us. Will big sheds
inhabited mostly by robots have anything
to do with interesting or progressive
architecture? Instead of despairing, Koolhaas
seems to suggest the potential for an era
of the new sublime, where industrial
megastructures can serve a landscape-altering
function as well as a cost-saving one.
Koolhaas’ big idea is that this landscape of
automation is our architectural destiny, the
most important spatial construct since the
skyscraper made the modern city a delirious
exploration of form, density and power.
In the hands of anyone else, it would be a
dispiriting prospect. But if you take a moremeasured approach, tomorrow’s topography
offers limitless potential. Koolhaas wonders,
‘What happens to the public realm... if it is
uninhabited?’, and you sense he’s itching to
shape these new frontiers of data and power.
Post-human architecture does promise an
otherworldly intersection of art and function.
Imagine reclusive land artist Michael Heizer
being invited to landscape a Gigafactory, or
warehouses set beneath a swooping canopy
of solar cells and wind turbines, a jungle
of technology where bug-like bots scuttle
about the forest floor. In 2014, the Irish artist
John Gerrard created Solar Reserve, an artwork
using video game technology which navigated
the Crescent Dunes solar energy plant in
Nevada. The plant uses 10,000 mirrors to
concentrate the sun’s rays to heat a core of
molten salt (that in turn boils water to power
turbines with steam). From the air it looks
like a vast circular temple installed by alien
technology. Meanwhile, in London, Carmody
Groarke is proposing a new city park atop
a sunken 180,000 sq m warehouse, with the
aggregate extracted from the site used to pay
for its creation. New spaces create new space.
Such projects suggest a new topography,
an age of invisible megastructures, where the
backroom work that buffers and sorts our
daily lives hums away in semi-automated
perfection. In contrast, our cities are evolving
into playgrounds of leisure and consumption,
where the only jobs are pushing the paper
that stimulates the demand and serves up the
orders. Yet the post-human landscape needn’t
result in an aesthetic wasteland. To make the
most of a world driven by machines, their
places of work can give back to the rest of us
in new and creative ways. ∂Empty
promise
Will tomorrow’s android
workers give fresh impetus
to large-scale architecture?ILLUSTRATOR: MENGXIN LI WRITER: JONATHAN BELL ∑ 103
Intelligence