01

The logistical city is a hypermediated environment

produced by the intervention of
interfaces on architectural and
urban spaces.

Arch 566 2016

John Leano

Logistical Interface
Hyper-mediated City

Introduction
As far back as 1964, Marshall McLuhan described
the global village as a place not so much altered
by the content of a medium, but rather, a space
transformed by the very nature of medias
themselves. For some, this is little more than the
inevitable evolution of urban space in the digital
age. For others, it represents the citys liberation
from the condition of stasis 1 While McLuhan
was referring to the spatial impact of emerging
media, the television in particular, this could
conceptually include a literal understanding
of media intervention in architectural and
urban spaces. If the logistical city is a mediated
environment, architecture and urban space must

Figure 1

be re-conceived as hyper-mediated spaces or

interfaces. Architecture itself has always been a
phenomenological and perceptual medium in
which materiality and formal composition allow
us enter a dialogue with the built environment.
Before the introduction of digital technology, we
understand that the wall divides space, program
and experience and can even be thought of
as an interstitial medium in and of itself.2 The
advent of the share economy and its digital
technologies has produced a further layer of
engagement through which we relate to the
environment around us. For example, media
interfaces or screens of digital information
expedite communication and consumption

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

independent of our location. Peapod, an online

grocery delivery service, once enabled passersby
to shop for groceries by pointing smartphone
cameras at a virtual grocery store which is a
billboard of product images and corresponding
QR codes. The strategy is an example of how
online order fulfillment undermines the
brick and mortar grocery by closing the gap
between a shopper and the products through
a smartphone interface grocery shopping
can happen anywhere. There are, in addition,
common yet overlooked forms of media that
more directly alter architecture and experience.
Fast-food drive-thrus or loading docks, for
instance, are architectural apertures which are
designed to accommodate vehicles interfacing
with the spaces of back-of-house operations.
These hyper-mediated spaces are alterations of
existing architectural or urban space through
logistical interfaces, embedding elements
of logistical systems to extend architectural
faculties to modes of delivery.
Development
The idea of hyper-mediated space is not new.
There are common forms of interface that
have served to smooth the frictions between
architecture, people, and product flows.
Dispensary machines, such as ATMs and
vending machines (from food kiosks to product

kiosks) have been extant for decades. These

interfaces that depend on virtual networks
collapse the time and distance that separate
consumers from cash or products via information
and automation. Teller windows at Currency
Exchange stores safely facilitate monetary
transactions that could otherwise become
hostile. Dumbwaiters or elevators are other
spatial interfaces that link vertical spaces and
serve as logistical corridors for the movement
of products and people. Further, the elevator
is one historical example of how mechanical
media has informed the architecture that houses
it, being partly responsible for the emergence
of skyscrapers in the 19th century. The drivethru window in its various forms is another
example of an invasive architectural interface
that lessens the time and distance between a
consumer on-the-go and fast food. So too is the
weather-sealed gasket of the warehouse which
Deborah Richmond describes in Consumers
Gone Wild as an architectural back3 - the final
threshold between the fulfillment supply chain
and the retail environment. The necessity for
this back-stage interface is responsible for the
mullet effect of big box retail stores such as
Wal-Mart and also suburban shopping malls
and strip malls which emphasize an eyecatching front while conducting business on
the back. One could arguably trace the docking

Figure 6

bays of fulfillment and distribution centers

themselves to the shipping port. The port is
the cultural and economic interface bridging
ocean and continent, and has been critical in the
development of human civilization.

Its evident these forms and scales of
interface have served the fluidity of markets
by optimizing processes of commercial
exchange, but they are often overlooked as
architectural informers. They are typically
interpreted as consequences of the need for
commercial efficiency and functionality. As
Branden Hookway identifies in Pandemonium,
they are abstractions that are actually the
boundary between idea and matter, spatial
and temporal relationships. 4 An interface can
be conventionally understood as an aperture
or screen, but like Hookway, if instead we
think about interface itself as the symbolic and
functional relationship between at least two
parties pending an interaction or exchange then
this can open up more formal possibilities. Also,
while we may not think of these intermediary
devices as media per se, they are nonetheless
means to specific ends in the consumerproducer relationship that have a significant
stake in the logistics of product movement. The
hyper-mediated spaces of the logistical city
would take this understanding to an extreme, for
example, in the realm of delivery fulfillment.

Projection
Unlike the proliferation of massive distribution
centers away from urban density, hypermediated space would concentrate in denser
areas close to the consumer. Concentration in
a neighborhood or at a residence, for example,
would close the gap between warehouse
logistics and the private domain.
Fulfillment Alley
The street itself is a type of urban conduit
that already mediates between the home and
the neighborhood. In Chicago, the alley is an
existing logistical conveyor for garbage handling,
telecom and power line maintenance, and an
outlet for backyard garages a public corridor
for the delivery of privately utilized services. The
alley can be re-imagined as a possible interface
to become a further localized segment of the
delivery fulfillment chain - accommodating
an additional logistical layer for package
distribution. In this model, the home directly
interfaces with the fulfillment chain by deploying
the conveyor belt in the alley as a fulfillment
conduit on which packages are picked up and
delivered at the alley ends. Given the demand
by the consumer for expedient delivery and the
ease of online ordering, the conveyor becomes
critical in both receiving and shipping. The
frictions between ordering and delivering are

Catalogue of typical interfaces and possible output

The Fulfillment Alley spans the length of an entire alley and occupies private space including the backyard and/or garage.

Packages are delivered and picked up at each end of the alley.

further smoothed, adding to the comforts of

home life in a similar way that the conveyor has
added to the convenience of sorting processes in
distribution centers.
Domestic Backstage / Conveyor Invasion
Porting the docking bay to the home brings the
influence of market transaction directly into the
domestic realm which, as history has shown with
the fulfillment center and shipping port, can lead
to the dramatic development of those mediated
environments. Conveyor invasion could similarly
alter existing domestic types beginning with the
transformation of the domestic interior, which is
already a revolving door of commodities. Taken
to a logical though quite dystopian extreme, the
home would no longer be a static commodity
container but rather a dynamic, hyper-mediated,
space for the consumption of things as they are
needed.
End Note
A hyper-mediated city involves logistical
developments at neighborhood and domestic
scales that reflect the current paradigm of
rapid and optimal product delivery and service.
The result is an expansion of operation of the
fulfillment center to that of the neighborhood
block and its constituent houses the final
and elusive frontier of big box operation. In
a sense, neighborhood blocks themselves
become distribution satellites for the final leg
of delivery. Meanwhile, the house, as Deborah
Richmond suggests in Consumers Gone Wild, has
itself become a speculative capital flow, a literal
commodity inside the flows of commodities5 in
the neighborhood of the hyper-mediated city.
The residential domain is finally consumed
by the fulfillment chain itself taking its place
as a small box or just another node in a vast
logistical network.

References

1. Enter the Space Inside a Wall: Two Installations by

The Chapuisat Brothers, last modified March 1, 2014,
http://socks-studio.com/2014/03/01/enter-the-spaceinside-a-wall-two-installations-by-the-chapuisatbrothers/.
2. The Mediated City, November 16, 2016, http://
architecturemps.com/the-mediated-city/.
3. Deborah Richmond, Consumers Gone Wild:
Distribution, in The Infrastructural City: Networked
Ecologies in Los Angeles, ed. Kazys Varnelis (Barcelona:
Actar, March 2008), 214.
4. Branden Hookway, Pandemonium (Princeton
Architectural Press, November 1, 1999), 76.
5. Deborah Richmond, Consumers Gone Wild:
Distribution, in The Infrastructural City: Networked
Ecologies in Los Angeles, ed. Kazys Varnelis (Barcelona:
Actar, March 2008), 216.

Image Captions

1. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 1967

2. Peapod, Virtual Grocery Store, 2012
3. Remi Gastin, New York Times Square, 2008
4. The Wachowski Brothers, The Matrix: Reloaded, still,
2003
5. Khalifa Port Container Terminal, 2014
6. Dave & Les Jacobs, Distribution Center Bay Doors,
2012

The conveyor linked to a house-integrated port could directly feed the fridge, which then becomes a type of domestic interface.

The home continuously digests stu - producing an infinitely configurable interior.