The ambition of Footprint 23 is to provide a critical survey of the architecture of logistics, unfolding the multivalences of its apparatus, dissecting its buildings and spaces, its technologies and labour relations, its historical evolutions as well as its future projections. Gathering academic papers and visual essays from researchers and emerging scholars in the field, the issue follows three main directions of inquiry.

The first trajectory attempts to define what logistics is and how it operates, focusing on the inherent ambivalence of its apparatus, able to cope with different scales and various temporal dimensions – from barcodes and gadgets to global routes and territorial infrastructures – constituting both a physical and abstract framework supporting, measuring and quantifying movements and actions, thoughts and desires. The second trajectory investigates the way logistics penetrates our existences, not simply by affecting how we live and work but the way in which it provides the very possibility of life as such, or, in other words, how logistics is inherently political. The third trajectory tackles the past, present and future of logistics, considered as the most crucial apparatus determining the human impact on the earth, controlling the distribution and organisation of organisms and ecosystems, triggering new and more violent forms of colonisation and exploitation.

This issue of Footprint does not seek definitive statements or hypothetic solutions for the monstrous nature of logistics. On the opposite, it aims at unfolding its inner contradictions to propose new possibilities of exploration for an architecture and its project. ... Read more

Along with creativity, optimism and will, the early 1970’s London architecture scene was a moment of ideological conflict between political factions over which direction progress should be oriented. Instead of a victor being declared and a single vector followed, what resulted, at the Architectural Association at least, was an academic framework set up to preserve and even encourage such tendencies for conflict and divergence. Behemoth Press introduces here a text by Elia Zenghelis first published in 1975 that was originally written as a polemical response to a growing movement for unionization; a political form of labor that surely threatens the great productive potentials of competition and precarity. ... Read more

The term "logistics" derives from the Greek logizomai standing for the art of reckoning, organising, planning. Through time it achieved a strict military connotation, dealing with the composition, lodging and movements of troops, the arrangement of provisions in hostile territories, the transportation and storage of artillery, food, medicines and fuel. Logistics also entailed the organisation of the battlefield, the construction of defensive systems and urban settlements, the planning of infrastructures and communication networks.

Architecture is of logistic origin. Not by chance Vitruvius’ De Architectura, the first Western treatise on architecture, was written by a soldier for Julius Caesar as a technical compendium of concrete and abstract machines. The Renaissance exegesis of Greek and Roman military treatises, along with the revival of the Vitruvian machinatio, established the foundations of an architecture of logistics, able to frame the emerging capitalist system of production, exchange and labour division.

Logistics not only revolutionised the form of battles, cities and fortifications but also the way architecture was produced. The evolution of firearms demanded economical investments and geographical expeditions, geometrical calculations of ballistic trajectories and accurate territorial surveys. The introduction of orthogonal projections detached the act of vision from the singularity of an observer towards infinite point of views, as the objectivity of axonometry replaced the vanishing-point of perspective. Cities were analysed as assemblages of objects, people and fluxes of commodities: as measurable and controllable machines.

Thus, long before the industrial revolution and mass-production, it seems that the particular convergence of warfare, technical representation and civic organisation produced an apparatus for administering space and time through abstract rationality, which today provides the unavoidable condition for any metropolis to subsist. This essay will attempt to read logistics by means of its architecture, retracing its genealogy through some of the spatial devices it produced and the struggles which triggered its development between the 14th and the 21st century. ... Read more

The Hague City Hall was a project about emptiness. Its flatness and deliberate incompleteness worked as a tableau for the fleeing dynamism of capitalist accumulation. Already during his early researches along the Berlin-wall, while studying at the Architectural Association in London, Koolhaas sought to translate in architectural terms the paradoxical effort of imaging nothingness, fascinated by the capacity of absence to trigger unforeseeable fantasies, monsters and violence, to generate energies in a much more intriguing form than any other object posed in the same place. The competition itself was about saturating an absence, aiming at revitalising the historical hearth of The Hague whose main cultural, administrative, commercial and public facilities were disconnected as an archipelago of incidental episodes. The Stadhuis was essentially a real-estate venture initiated in 1985 by the alderman of the Council Commission for Planning and Urban Renewal Adri Duivesteijn who, after 80 years of conjectures and aborted projects, proposed to converge the administrative offices and the central library within a unique building in Spui. Converging huge financial resources on a single symbolical intervention, in 1986 Duivesteijn managed to launch a competition for five Dutch developers associated with international renown architects – Richard Meier, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Van den Broek & Bakema, Helmut Jahn, Cabinet Saubot et Julien – to submit a proposal. In December, the jury led by Aldo van Eyck, awarded the OMA plan. Nevertheless, despite a large debate on local newspapers, the council ultimately commissioned Richard Meier the construction of a grandiose public atrium, which better fit the social democratic representative ambitions of the municipality. On the contrary, given the ‘amateurish and unstable’ character of the program, OMA proposed an austere three-dimensional frame to be filled with program, people and activities: a sort of city within the city. The intention was to create an architecture sufficiently indeterminate to accommodate endless variation, a building able to program instability and organise flexibility by means of architectonic eloquence. ... Read more

According to Carl Schmitt, XX century was the result of a series of secular progressive “neutralisations and de-politicisations” aimed at dissolving antagonism within the sedating domain of market competition and technological religion. Liberalism was nothing but the replacement of politics with policy, conflict with civilisation, enmity with humanity, State with Society and, in this sense, the present “post-political” Empire, which governs through an extended universal neutral democracy made of control apparatuses, management and mass manipulation, seems the outcome of the economical prophecies of modernity, whose fundamental project was to subsume and tame the human generic nature – the innate engendering faculty – as fundamental source for production and development of its system of exploitation. But if contemporary capitalism undermined any distinction between labor and life, salary and income, consumption and reproduction, work and political action, then precisely labor, in its precarious and most generic form, would offer the most profitable battlefield to elaborate new strategies of exodus “to make the brain of the system mad”. This essay is thus an attempt to redefine the factory as the architectural paradigm of the modern metropolis, reconsidering “genericness” not as its mere steady default status but rather as its proper ontological source, which provides the conditions for any further evolution and, therefore, the possibility for politically acting within and against the total reality of production. ... Read more