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From 1–12 July 2013 Tommaso Franzolini will direct the second edition of Factory Futures – the AA Visting School in Ivrea, Italy. For more information please visit http://factoryfutures.tumblr.com.
Image of a Google server, located all over the world from Iowa to Finland
start to populate their own in each city because it is more efficient than current ‘mega datacentres’ and creates a more efficient network by distributing data to the edge: without the need of a physical building, the philosophy behind these Generation 4 datacentres are opening realistic scenarios of fully distributed, highly delocalised conditions of production and capitalising on the exponential powers of grid computing. Current technological advancements in the industry of data storage and distribution are enabling the gradual transformation from an economy based on the networking of human intelligence towards a new economy based on the networking of machine intelligence 5 : the architecture of the factory loses any traditional spatial quality and reappears as highly generic stuff devoid of any representational content – ie, black boxes of circuitry and silicon distributed in what remains of the old concept of the city. In actualising the theories of a legacy that span from Hilberseimer, to Branzi and Natalini, this radical integration of building and information technology seems to question once again the very foundation of architecture and urban design. As the technomorphic, non-spatial, non-figurative distributed character of this stuff represents the last material expression of the
increasingly abstract character of our productive relationships, it may also offer a new disciplinary opportunity to rethink the production of contemporary aspects of space: the problematisation of dynamic processes, the spatialisation of information and the incorporation of information technologies into matter may become the necessary resources for the re-empowerment of the discipline within contemporary conditions of production. 1 ‘This is our first time in the situation where we couldn’t store all the information we create even if we wanted to.’ John F. Gantz, ‘The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe’. An IDC White Paper. March 2008. 2 datacenterknowledge.com – A useful repository on datacentre related news 3 globalfoundationservices.com – GFS is the engine that powers Microsoft’s cloud services 4 loosebolts.wordpress.com – Michael Manos CTO of AOL Services 5 For greater details see: Philippe Morel, ‘n extensions à Extensions de la grille. Sur la production contemporaine et la notation à partir de Le Corbusier et Ludwig Hilberseimer’, in Multitudes 20, printemps 2005, Paris, March 2005.