Solidarity and Refrigeration

Solidarity and Refrigeration

Living with|in the Machine of the Coldscape

Alexis M. Luna Fall 2018

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Frankenstein's Cat: Cuddling Up to Biotech's Brave New Beasts, Emily Anthes, 2013

“nature” on thin ice Solidarity is so hard to come by nowadays, maybe because it is only a myth. 1 Rather than solidarity, we come across an intimate and relational quality to our infrastructure in the most unexpected ways and in banalest places. Like that of the Preferred Freezer Service facility in Elizabeth, NJ. In this paper, I will be discussing the topic of cold storage infrastructure in the United States, particularly the Preferred Freezer Service company, and using cold storage as a vehicle to speak to questions about person solidarity among the infrastructural environments we create.

By looking to historians, journalist, theorist and designers that deal with solidarity, cold storage, capitalism and “nature” I argue that cold storage infrastructure is a critical piece in understanding what it means to be human in an epoch of questionable anthropocentrism.

A discussion of cold storage infrastructure is incomplete without an appropriation of the term “nature”, what exactly does this mean in an epoch of anthropic and capitalist dom-

inated biosphere change? Cold Storage gives us more questions than answers. The very advent of freezer technology is to escape perishability 2, to cheat the clock of decay, in the pursuit of capital nonetheless. Among the scholarship that has been written addressing infrastructure’s role in being a part of and creating its own environment 3, the topic of cold storage warehouses stands alone in the mess of entanglements 4 , addressing both human and non-human actors. Considering the extended “freshness” and bio-hacking5 that have developed in our food chain, preconceived understandings of “nature” do not work when discussing the un-perishable, the human and the machinery used, all reaching a meeting point within the cold storage facility. With their consistently white panel exteriors, a seemingly hard line is drawn between the inner workings of the facility and the outside, however, this “white box” is in constant flux between the parts which make it function and the content within. Indeed many boundaries are difficult to draw, with solidarity 6 between human and “nature” being dismissible as a myth 7, what new “natures” and environments have emerged from all this meddling? In cold 3

storage’s attempt to escape these entanglements it has perhaps rallied in more non-human human actors than it has bargained for.

Considering this, perhaps the current epoch needs a new, messier mascot.8 Mascots of a Colder Epoch Mascots as a segway take us a little ways back to 1895 and a curious case for feline fever that emerged in the Scientific American Journal, titled Cats and Cold Storage9.

The Philadelphia dispatch had onboard some furry friends within their cold storage facility. Within the freezing rooms ranging 10⁰ F - 40⁰ F an unusually adaptive cat successfully nursed a litter of seven kittens with three becoming extra cold resilient in their thickened coats and unusually large size. Perplexing enough, after these three kittens had matured, the mother cat had been removed from the cold storage room and returned to her original house where she became deathly ill. The change of climate or temperature seemed to affect her almost immediately.

She got very weak and languid. We placed her again in the cold storage room when she immediately revived 10 . Indeed it seems that our freezer feline had been conditioned to stay in a particular climate, suggesting a mutation in the mother cats genes the cold storage facility had, in essence, become a vital psychological infrastructure for her.

This case sounds fishy, and indeed it is!

(As we will appropriately get into shrimp later on) This article, originally published in 1894 11 , had received criticism the following year claiming some of its findings “exaggerated” and having “but slight foundation in fact”, whether true or not it is arguably, if not appropriate, to say that the entire premise of cold storage is rooted in works of fiction!

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Michael Osman, a historian of particular expertise in cold storage development in the United States, often refers to the 1887 novel Looking Back 12 by Edward Bellany in introducing the speculative qualities surrounding cold storage. In Bellany’s novel the main character, Julian West, undergoes a basement experiment where he essentially preserves himself and wakes up in the future. It is important to unpack the term preserve, as West does not freeze himself, rather he escapes his mortality and the vitality of his body through a period of uninterrupted sleep and his basement contraption that regulated cool fresh air to enter while stale air was exhausted. Awaking in the year 2000 perfectly preserved, his death-defying feat was made possible by the combination of an extraordinary hypnotic method and well-regulated domestic architecture. 13 The latter seems less than glamorous compared to the other components of his novel but it was technologically unheard of to possess such machinery domestically. If we step back a little further it was unheard of to regulate environmental qualities such as air, let alone cold air. In fact, the histories of such regulatory devices, such as thermostats and air conditioners consist of metaphorical and physiological relations.

Looking towards the works of scientist Alexander Ure and his Frankenstein-esque experiments we can begin to illustrate the ties which draw not only our feline friend into cold storage infrastructure but ourselves as well.

P.F.S Enter Preferred Freezer Service of Elizabeth, NJ 14 : Our agent of banality, the background operator of the cold chain, the huge white box I approach welcomes me with the deafening sounds of exhaust from the parade

PFS Elizabeth, Arial Photograph edited by author, 2018

PFS Elizabeth, Arial Photograph provided by RKB Architects

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GEA FES Compressors, GEA Catalog Drawing edited by author

Counterbalance, Forklift Truck Londahl, 1981.

Drawing edited by author

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of trucks both parked and inserted into the facility. As I stood at the corner of the PFS (Preferred Freezer Service) office waiting to be buzzed in it became increasingly clear that they do not get many visitors. Upon entry I was asked to watch an introductory video into the company, profiling their sense of community and occasional office outings, what followed were some videos rather lacking in humanity, in that there weren’t any people in them, particularly in the newer automated facilities. After borrowing a cold storage approved jacket and leaving the office corner we began our tour to the artificially created winter, we were entering “the coldscape” What became revealing throughout my tour is that what followed the office corner was not a building, occupying an identity between machine and building the cold storage facility is more a collection of parts than a comprehensive whole. Masked in a clinical white aluminum finish, the illusion of a massive contained box is actually an incomplete assembly of generators, control panels, racks, conduits, cameras, cherry pickers, stock pickers, trusses, satellites, people and shrimp.

The facility truly exemplifies its assembly line qualities when the freight trucks attach themselves to the side openings (the only openings), only here does the “building” seem to complete itself through function.

From here it is a dialog of labor and product that keeps the facility in motion. After leaving the loading dock of 30⁰ F the palettes and workers move past the plastic strip doors and vapor barrier into the freezer. Ranging from -5⁰ F to -10⁰ F, I was surprised to learn that this facility is in operation almost 24 hours a day. Perhaps Julian West had been asleep in one of these racks. Lining the ceiling were a series of tracks with matching rails on the ground between the incredibly narrow aisle

spacing of pallet racks. Sandwiched between these were various case pickers and order pickers, moving up and down to scan and order palettes along the racks, it is without saying that the thousands of palette boxes and racks create dramatic perspectives.

GEA FES Compressors, PFS Elizabeth Photograph by author

After experiencing temperatures akin to that of frozen shrimp, I was taken to see where the facility gets the winter-like quality from.

In a room out of anyone's sight in a secluded second floor housed three 10 ft long GEA FES system compressors and a small one for backup. Installed with a control panel, and deafening exhaust noise, each compressor can create a table measuring the temperature of nearly every place in the facility, every 30 seconds. The compressor assembly is so complex and mature in its process that the entire 200,000 sqft facility works solely off one compressor. According to the warehouse manager Patrick Ternyila, “the rest is back up”. It is my hunch that most people don’t casually visit a cold storage facility, not recognized the fact that one may be lurking in their own backyard. This is perhaps out of obscurity as to that the “huge white box” actually is. In any case, this perception is poignantly polar to the role of heroism, economic salvation, and fiction affiliated with cold storage at the turn of the 19th century.

A History of Fiction

VNA Palette Racks, PFS Elizabeth Photograph by author

Perhaps ironic or perfectly timed, the start of major breakthroughs in cold storage mechanical systems begins with human corpses and a mad scientist. Andrew Ure (1778-1854) (pseudo mad scientist) is a particularly interesting figure in the practical application but also the speculative understanding of cold storage/ air regulation. As Osman points out: Although he never directly tied his physiological interest in electricity to 7

thermostatic control, both his examination of the electrical regulation of bodily movement and his design of regulatory device positioned his thinking at the center of a metaphorical exchange between organisms and machines.15 Coincidently, while Mary Shelley published her novel about Dr. Victor Frankenstein circa 1818, Ure led experiments to put corpses into motion by means of electric shock. With his experiments, Ure showed that electrifying the phrenic nerve and the top of the diaphragm could induce a breath 16 Ure’s scope of work exceeded the electrification of a single corpse, however, according to Osman he envisioned a parallel organizational system to that in the nerves of animal for machinery found in increasingly complex production facilities.17 Ure wanted to create a “unified self-acting machine” the likes of which his corpse previously possessed. Although Ure did not develop his vision in his lifetime by his own hands, his writings did take on a life of their own in the form of the thermostat and the thermophone. These inventions would act as instruments of regulation, performing a function akin to the electrical impulses in the human body, if distributed throughout a given building would its system be reflexive like that of an organism? The physiological ties which regulate our organism inspired “factory systems” to regulate the factory building.

The possibility of making a human, animal, and machine functionally comparable across the board only begins to reveal the intimacy of actors in cold storage infrastructure.

Architects commissioned for the task were Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, with the title “BIGGEST IN THE WORLD” headlining the Chicago Tribune. The warehouse would offer a combined 3,000,000 cubic feet of storage within which 850,000 feet of condensation pipe would have a cooling capacity equivalent to 600 tons of melting ice per day. 18 During the opening ceremony of the Chicago Cold Storage Exchange a strong emphasis was brought to the ingenuity of the facility, the temperature within the storerooms could be made either that of the Polar Regions or of the burning tropics, and the ceremony celebrated the diverse consumer diet that came about from the cold storage facility, “enjoy the bananas of Yucatan, the watermelons of Georgia, the peaches of Michigan, the strawberries of Southern Illinois, and the pears of California in midwinter.” 19

I believe Osman describes the influence of this procedure best, stating the effects of cold storage as: “Liquid Commodity displaced from its physical origin.” 20 Cold Storage allowed for the commodification of produce, flattening the geographic realities of each items locality and precise climate requirements to the confines of one warehouse. Mother Nature's timer, decay, and moisture had been mitigated enough to be sidelined as an optional reality, “the shifting patterns of weather would put the produce merchant into a commanding position over the forces of nature.” 21 The very notion of nature becomes critically questionable Aside from regulatory aspirations, cold if we read Osman’s commodification of storage began to draw traction similar to decay with Jason Moore’s notion of “cheap other heroic public buildings through its nature.” 22 Capital-will guides both sides of promise of economic nourishment. Large the same coin here, as “cheapness” obscures sums of capital investment went into the the quantity of said “nature”, we imagine development of the largest cold storage ourselves outside of the world of the perfacility in the United States, in Chicago. The ishable. Geographic dimensions and time 8

Left to Right Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, 1881 Bimetallic Thermophone at the Quincy Market Cold Storage Company, 1897 Alder and Sullivan Rendering of Chicago Cold Storage Exchange, 1890

Andrew Ure experiments on the corpse of murderer Matthew Clydesdale, 1818.

Ure would go on to conduct a series of these electrifying experiments on cows as well.

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PFS Richland Washington Dock Area, RKB Architects 2015.

The Works, Kate Ascher Banana Ripening Room, Images by Nicola Twilley

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are obscured when put away in the freezer, exerting dominance over these qualities as if we are not also subject to them. In the creation of cold storage, bananas and pears were not the only commodities created, freshness replaced decay and imperishability had become a reality. In all ways, capitalism has exploited various resources we cannot sidestep the exploitation of decay.

for being too slow, too philosophical, not nimble enough to keep up with technology.25 Perhaps prophetic, Banham’s warnings might have anticipated the proliferation of environmental control technology in an area not often associated with architecture, food.

An incredible amount of the content that surrounds our food aisles is at the end of an exhaustive journey of refrigeration and logistics; the “cold chain,” a linked network of Enter the Coldscape atmospheric regulation on which our entire way of life depends on. 26 One example of a “cheapened” commodity at work today “Cheapness” is a quality of the coldscape: is the banana. Bananas are a tropical treat the unobtrusive architecture of man’s unthat can be located in nearly any grocery and ending struggle against time, distance, and corner store, this is thanks to a cycle of cold entropy itself 23 , welcome in. chain logistics. Since bananas are tropical fruit they are cut while green, immature, The aversion of decay has, in turn, built the washed and refrigerated at 56 F until backbone of the American lifestyle, food reaching their country of consumption. lifestyle. "The diet of the average American The bananas are then stored in pressurized, is almost entirely dependent on the existence environmentally contained ripening rooms of a vast, distributed winter--a seamless within a larger facility storing other goods. network of artificially chilled processing plants, distribution centers, shipping conIn an interview with the operations manager tainers, and retail display cases that creates of Banana Distributors of New York Paul the permanent global summertime of our Rosenblatt (one of four main banana-ripsupermarket aisles." 24 As unperceivable a ening outfits supplying the city’s grocery cheese cave or banana ripening room is to stores, bodegas, coffee shops, and food cart the foreground of a major city, it does not vendors) Twilley had questioned the heating diminish its importance in the way that process of artificial banana ripening where the city operates the flows of its cheese and Rosenblatt explained “the energy coming off bananas. The architecture/ infrastructure a box of ripening bananas could heat a small of coldscape is varied yet highly overlooked, apartment.” It would be an understatement hidden in plain sight yet extremely specific. to say that the technology that ripens our Appropriately Reyner Banham’s work dis- bananas is sophisticated, it has essentially cusses the need for intentionality and close surpassed the forces of ripening, decay and attention with mechanization and architec- has created a commodity. Bananas are only ture. He presumed that mechanization was the tip of the artificial iceberg when it comes a fundamental process in the historical devel- to highly specialized, cheapened happenings opment of buildings, more essential than of our commodities. Physically, where these any other cultural force, and warned that if commodities collide in the midst of cold architects remained as they were, they would storage infrastructure is of particular imporbecome irrelevant to the building process tance to this discussion.

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Architect of Refrigeration The company in question (Preferred Freezer Service) is probably one you’ve never heard of, as common of most cold storage warehouses nowadays. Preferred Freezer Services, or PFS, opened its first facility in 1989 in Perth Amboy, NJ and within its 29 years in operation, it has opened 28 facilities throughout the United States including one in China and in Vietnam. 27 Grossing over 200 million cubic feet in its distributed winter, the coldscape of PFS is highly specified, rapidly evolving economically and autonomously.

Above is the hit list of the small town Boston office of RKB architects who are the architects of refrigeration, with their facilities grossing over 3 million square feet of cold storage. As stated in their website: “These buildings host all aspects of product distribution which include the integration of automated systems and robotics. These buildings range in size from 83,000 SF 500,000 SF, with over 159 million cubic feet of freezer space to date.” 28 But the size of these facilities is, however, greatly misleading when we consider the content over the enclosure. These facilities are by appearance buildings, but in all practical sense, they only appear this way when they are outside of loading hours and no activity is happening. Appropriately they are more a machine agglomeration of many machines, stationary on the exterior but fully transient in its interior. As an active environment of inputs and outputs, the facility in Elizabeth passes through nearly 200 million lbs of food a year, holding 38 million lbs at any given time. If we speculate over the amount 12

of content that passes through the facility in one year its footprint actually expands by almost a factor of five! PFS Elizabeth primarily deals with seafood, in particular, tail-on and tail-off shrimp shipped from India. Palettes are typically brought into the facility by a freight truck and a group of workers, each palette has close to 100 boxes of shrimp with labels like 26 - 30 [shrimp per pound] Tail-On. If we take these numbers and apply it to the 200 million lbs of food per year as previously mentioned, in one shrimp intensive scenario PFS Elizabeth could see 6 billion shrimp pass through their facility.

If we apply some of these speculations on content supply and footprint to PFS’s largest facility in Richland, Washington 29 it could expand to 55 acres in area, that is larger than the entire campus of the New Jersey Institute of Technology!

Considering the machine assemblage contained within our frozen giant, does the enclosure even matter? In a practical sense, yes, the vapor barriers, insulated walls and floors, the roof vents and heating coils allow the cold stay within the facility but, it does not in have to be this shape. The exterior, especially in the newer automated facilities, is secondary in construction to the racks, cranes, and compressors inside. The exterior is, in essence, a thermal wrapper, it does not provide structural integrity (as the columns and racks take this task in PFS Elizabeth) it can possibly take on any other form, but it doesn’t, and it matters what form it takes on in our understanding of PFS cold storage.

Banham and Dallegret’s essay A Home is Not a House better state my questions in the reading of content vs exterior: “When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi reverberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters

All PFS project completed by RKB Architects, 2018.

Drawing showing the size vs expansion capability of PFS Elizabeth and PFS Richland based on content not footprint.

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– when it contains so many services that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up?” 30 What then holds up the cold storage exterior? In size it is baffling, in scale its influence is astounding but in its operation, how are we to understand ourselves within the machine?

The "White Box"

Section of PFS Elizabeth, Drawing focuses on the mechanical equipment over the enclosure.

Banham, Reyner; Dallegret, François. A Home is Not a House. 1965

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But perhaps to gage PFS is to realize that its interaction capabilities are beyond that of a single human. The neutralizing effects of the plain white exterior are, in a sense, a reverse “white room” 31 ; where instead of being the interior interface between human and machine, PFS finds itself between the tensions of the machine and the urban. Carefully composed in its reserved formal appearance, the exterior merely masks the “grey grime” of its interior; with no windows in sight lining the landscape of white aluminum panels followed by the arcade of freight truck openings this facility is persuasive in our reading of it as a neutral, objective, anti-environmental, machine.

In other examples of machine v. human objective interaction (IBM buildings and interiors designed by Elliot Noye), we see qualities that flip themselves when considering PFS spatial qualities. Where the IBM “white room” described by Harwood may have availed environmental stimuli and through its rigor achieved a sense of “total control” PFS Elizabeth only exemplifies this through its exterior. Though PFS may have created an internal eternal winter, they cannot escape environment stimuli because they have subsequently created their own, crafting an environment for various non-human actors and un-crafting spaces

for human ones, the users occupy the space in contingency to market demands through layers and layers of security and temperature control mechanisms. At every moment the human users encounter machines of surveillance, packaging, sorting, distributing, and refrigerating, everything within the facility is tailored to the product. The further we examine the components assembled in PFS the more apparent it is that people are not suited for such an infrastructure. Rather, where other machines have had mapped onto them the form of the human body 32 , the facilities which RKB group have designed map the imprint of machines and packaged seafood.

This becomes evident to any worker or visitor that spends time in the PFS facility as there are precautionary clothing measures to take when entering the deck area, freezer space and when interacting with the trucks, pallets, and racks. Unarmed, a single person cannot operate within this machine, they must use an apparatus such as a cherry picker, palette picker, order picker or stock picker in order to move the content. These apparatuses also create a thermal jacket between the user and the interior environment. I argue that beyond the operationally tricky hurdles the design of PFS goes to great lengths to hide its identity as a machine. Existing only a few miles from two family houses the facility cannot rely on being on the river coast, nestled within a highway or underground to assimilate itself into the urban fabric, rather it masks itself to be perceptually inconspicuous.

The "White Box" Photograph edited by author

Exit Plan of PFS Elizabeth Photograph by author

Our capacity to go beyond the machine rests in our power to assimilate the machine. Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity, impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realms, we cannot go further in our development towards the more richly organic, the more profoundly human.33 15

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Generation III PFS Facility in construction Image from Frazier Rack company, 2015

Generation III PFS Facility in construction Image from Frazier Rack company, 2015 18

In his prolific writing, Mumford describes what we are visually presented with when it comes to the seemingly stagnant exterior of PFS: “we need to guard ourselves against the fatigue of dealing with too many objects or being stimulated unnecessarily by their presence...Hence a simplification of the externals of the mechanical world is almost a prerequisite for dealing with its internal complications...the environment itself must be made as neutral as possible.”34 PFS perhaps knows that unlike IBM, the spatial interaction of their operations has an additional actor. Having to create the spatial interface between machine, human and animal is no clean cut task, indeed the creation of this multi-actor environment within the cold storage facility does not end inside it. Rather, its influences extend to the preconceived worlds of the animal, machine, and human where the boundaries of each are continually ambiguous.

to creating a hermetically sealed system to keep the users from the “poisonous gas” of the outside. In Banham’s reading of the Larkin building, he saw a case to argue that environmental systems (environmental management) 36 were developed to create well-tempered environments for humans and perpetually improving itself based on human biological needs. Proposing that the process of modernization created and ever tighter fit between architecture and its users, much like a space suit. 37 PFS facilities are, however, in flux between categories of machine, infrastructure and architecture, rendering their relationship to one type of user rather polyamorous. Osman points to this by stating: “if environmental technologies, like all other technologies, serve many overlapping purposes, then they cannot be reduced to the determinations of a single naturalized essence like human biology.” 38 Automation Sensations

Running away from Entanglements PFS has experimented in human-less facilities, their Generation III facilities are fully automated palette rack structures that contain self-aware aisle-changing cranes, PFS might just be replicating what has more dedicated freezer space and additional already existed. PFS sets out to create a climatic Winterland within its massive perim- cubic height whilst maintaining the same eter in the way we might experience winter footprint. PFS pride and joy in this endeavor elsewhere on the “outside”. However, due to is their 455,000 sqft behemoth in Richland, our environmental dependencies be perhaps Washington. The 116-foot-tall facility offers don’t have an outside in the way we believe 117,000 total pallet storage positions, with there is a “nature”, Latour illustrates these vertical storage of 11 pallet positions. Each relationships by dogmatically stating: “There freezer is fully automated and features conis no outside: outside is another inside with veyors, specialized cranes – known as storage another climate control, another thermostat, and retrieval machines – and pallet moles another air-conditioning system.” 35 In the rather than human-operated equipment sense of creating environments, Banham has typically used in warehouses. 39 The location of this facility is opportunistic in its proximicritiqued modernist buildings such as the Larkin Building in doing just that. In having ty to an existing railroad spur which PFS has decided to expand to facilitate their frozen to manage the pollution problem created frenzy. A total of three rail spurs totaling by nearby locomotives, Wright resorted 19

6,000 feet of track will be installed on site for railcar staging and 800 feet of track will be installed for active loading and unloading of rail cars. The facility will have the capacity to turn 30 rail cars per day, while thirty-five trolleys will be operating around the clock, seven days a week, moving 6,000 pallets, each weighing approximately one and a half metric tons. All things considered, roughly 2 billion pounds of frozen products are anticipated to go through the facility annually!40 That is double the speculations we anticipated in the previous calculations!

that is, an assembly of humans and the nonhuman elements that represent their interests. 41 In another of Latour’s prolific tellings, he argues for the dependent and contingent relationship of environment and user, stating that “there is an atmospheric chemical difference when people are in one place as opposed to not being there … we often see ourselves in the environment but we, in fact, make the environment.” In the case of PFS Generation III automated facilities, human presence systematically changes the environment. Due to the highly monitored LTW system, the temperature Emphasizing the lack of humanity in the is frequently measured and any presence facility, the warehouse simulates some detected which happens to be at a different outer space qualities. The warehouse will temperature causes the system to shut down. be the first in the United States to feature Practically this is to make sure no person an oxygen reduction system as its main fire gets run over by a 10,000 lb self-aware crane, prevention system. In addition to the lack but the critical take away here is that even in of oxygen in the automated freezer, it is the most autonomous, self-aware, air-tight, completely dark, PFS rational is that it is far outer-space like space the human cannot be too risky to change a lightbulb 116 ft in the ruled out. Relationally entangled through air and costs are massively reduced when and through, perhaps we are chimeras.42 heat from the lightbulb doesn’t interfere with -10⁰ F temperatures. Structurally it is In a human attempt of solidarity from the the content that truly matters, the 313,000 machine, from the “outside” we find the square feet of steel rack serves both as the failures of such an endeavor, the likes of pallet storage structure for the freezer and Biosphere 2. Refrigeration, as inferred by the main building structure, providing the Osman, is a means to create environments structural support for the roof and walls. and possible new “natures”. In the retelling The truth behind the cold dark automated of Biosphere 2, Turner points to one of the freezer is that with all its sophistication and more peculiar, never the less publicized, warehouse management system, it cannot recent events that sought to construct an operate without the human-operated dock environment. In this Buckminster Fulland trucks. PFS has then yet to disentangle er-inspired experiment located in Arizona, humans from its “nature”. eight “bionauts” 43 attempted to live in a Turning back to Latour, it is productive bubbled world. Undoubtedly affecting for our discussion to talk of PFS and its their physiological and physical conditions, various components as “collective things”, the dependence of oxygen was completely to understand the role of a technological machine driven. Here an essential resource object would require including the motiva- we associate with wilderness or “nature” has tions of its users, markers, and maintenance been funneled, monitored and managed by a workers and each of their ties to a collective, machine and operator. What is consistent in 20

this experiment of a constructed nature, and the one we are formerly apart of is the reliance on resources such as oxygen and food.

“They bartered most of their possessions, but food was too precious to trade.” This was perhaps a misguided endeavor from the start in that disassociation from the “wilderness” or “nature” only emphasized their reliance on environmental control systems.

Redundancy might be the biggest critique here, since constructing a world in which the food supply is almost entirely regulated by a machine and its operators is a a world far too familiar to the coldscape.

Shrimp Heist and VR Chickens

The coldscape has a sense of humor, in some instances the highly connected network of the cold chain reveals itself through security, barcodes and reward money. In a curious case of shrimp demand, on Wednesday, June 9, 2011, PFS offered a USD 5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the individual or individuals responsible for stealing a truckload of shrimp in California.

As we’ve come to know shrimp is a very big deal within PFS supply chain. The case description was of a tractor-trailer that picked up 1,550 cases (weighing 31,000 pounds) of 31/40-count Victory Seafood brand easy-peel shrimp from Preferred’s Vernon, Calif., facility on 31 May and was scheduled to deliver the product to a Gouldsboro, Penn., cold-storage facility by 7 June, but the tractor-trailer never showed up. Each 20-pound case of farmed shrimp from Thailand contains 10 2-pound bags inside the master box. The Preferred lot numbers issued to the product are 75192F and 72734F. The lot number was stamped on each case for traceability purposes. 44 Luckily, PFS had broadcasted the issue, settled a reward for the truck, and managed to retrieve the stolen

Drawing Difficult Boundaries

Second Livestock, VR Chicken, Center for Genomic Gastronomy and Austin Stewart, 2014 21

Species 22

A Symbiotic re

s Stories

eading of PFS

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shrimp truck within 48 hrs. The multiple actors involved in this incident highlights not only show the efficient security within the facility but the tight nit maintenance network PFS is involved in. Until the next highjacked truck of mahimahi 45 a year later.

Highjacking is actually a common feature of the coldscape, outside of shrimp heist and into an anatomic level of speculation we see that un-perishability is only one side of the journey through the cold storage, there is still everything done before death to biologically hack the creature. The Center for Genomic Gastronomy studies these queries and has developed an exhibition titled Second Livestock, which explores livestock cyborgs among other things. One bleak yet playful case is that of the Chicken with a VR set, this project is a critique of the current practices around commercially sold chickens and at the same time addresses the capitalist regimes that have altered the very makeup of these chickens. Considering the infrastructure of chicken coops that have been designed to alter the very make up of commercially sold chickens, this VR set is tactically dealing with the grim reality that these chickens cannot un-become what they are. The capitalist operations have altered the ongoingness 46 of these chickens, they no longer exist to the conventional notions of “nature”, rather they are part of the biohacking akin to the world of the coldscape.

… that things are entangled in relations; rather everything is itself an entanglement” 48 Past the point of socially collective, we are arguably anatomically a collective as well. Indeed we become, as Donna Haraway has put it, a hot composite pile 49 , through the foods we eat and the organisms which eat us.

Throughout the various readings of the cold storage infrastructure and all its happening, the case is made that neither anthropic or capital are sufficient to speak to towards the ongoingness of our current epoch; rather than humans + nature, nature + humans, humans in nature or nature in humans we can turn to writers such as Haraway who argues we are a hot composite pile: complex, entangled, multi-actor and multi-species.

Living with-in the machine of the Coldscape is to stay in constant question and trouble, but it is to realize that human utilitarianism and “Nature” are worlds that are unattainable. Instead, we can take optimistic positions, as Haraway urges, to be responsive, to have response-ability, to stay within the trouble of non-solidarity. Cold storage facilities are mechanized, and regulated to escape the trouble, to reject the perishable nature of “Nature”. These facilities are not in a state of rest, rather they are dispersed, in constant motion between several parts, the cold storage warehouse is merely a node in the commodification of nature. We then cannot buy into the belief that we exist outside of entanglements, that we are conquerors of The Difficult Whole our “nature”, rather we exist in the messy mess of flash frozen shrimp, mutated cats, Suffice to say: We Have Always Been Bio and vr chickens. The infrastructure of the 47 Hackers. But as we consume these mutat- cold storage facility is that of these entangleed chickens and heisted shrimp, we perhaps ments and a more complex symbiotic reality, become more akin to their qualities than not the escape of it. The barrier to entry is we realize. “Far from autonomous entities, as thin as the aluminum frame assembly humans - like all other animals - are a rag-tag masking PFS, we do not need a transition assemblage of largely bacterial entities in into the facility, we are within the world of constant flow, or as Ingold puts it, “it is not the coldscape, we are the machines.

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Generation III PFS Automated Facility Image from RKB Architects, 2018

Cat's Cradle/ String Theory, Baila Goldenthal, 2008.

Oil on Canvas, 36 x 48 in.

Cat's cradle suggests an open-ended practice of continous weaving, perhaps reflecting the complexity in human relationships. It leaves more questions for us to consider with the many actors in such facilities as the image above.

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ENDNOTES

1

Gilbert, Scott F, et al. A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals. The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 87, No. 4 (December 2012), pp. 325-341 Is the self a myth? Gilbert et al. challenge the notion of autonomy and “individuality” from an anatomical, physiological, evolutionary (etc…) perspective.

“We perceive only that part of nature that our technologies permit and, so too, our theories about nature are highly constrained by what our technologies enable us to observe.” “ Symbiosis is becoming a core principle of contemporary biology, and it is replacing an essentialist conception of “individuality” with a conception congruent with the larger systems approach now pushing the life sciences in diverse directions. These findings lead us into directions that transcend the self/nonself, subject/object dichotomies that have characterized Western thought (Tauber 2008a,b)” Changes in the understanding of microbial symbiosis within the animal kingdom, interactive relationships among species blur the boundaries of the organism and obscure the notion of essential identity, (Gilbert). What if there is no monogenetic being, but all species are co-dependent for evolution? “holobiont” has been introduced as the anatomical term that describes the integrated organism comprised of both host elements and persistent populations of symbionts.

“Every genome is a historical product and, just like the cell, it is the result of ancient symbioses and horizontal gene transfers. We are genomic chimeras: nearly 50% of the human genome consists of transposable DNA sequences acquired exogenously.”

“Thus, animals can no longer be considered individuals in any sense of classical biology: anatomical, developmental, physiological, immunological, genetic, or evolutionary. Our bodies must be understood as holobionts whose anatomical, physiological, immunological, and developmental functions evolved in shared relationships of different species.”

27

2 Osman, Michael. Regulation, Architecture and Modernism in the United States, 1890-1920. PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008. http://hdl.handle. net/1721.1/45939.

3 Larkin, Brian. The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure, The Anual review of Anthropology 2013.

4 Hird, Myra J. Waste, Landfills, and an Environmental Ethic of Vulnerability. Ethics and the Environment, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring 2013, pg. 105-124, Indiana University Press.

5 DENFELD, ZACK; KRAMER, CATHRINE, Works, CenterforGenomicGastronomy.com 6 Morton, Timothy. Humankind Solidarity with Nonhuman People. Verso, London, New York, 2017.

Morton introduces a useful term to describe “Nature”: “Symbiotic Real”. This is to detach the notion of nature from its arguable origins in enlightenment western thought as a thing to be harnessed or captured.

7 Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, London, New York, 2015.

8 Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016.

Haraway playful, yet sternly argues for a new mascot to represent our current epoch, one that is not anthropic or capital oriented.

9 Cats and Cold Storage Source: Scientific American, Vol. 73, No. 3 (July 20, 1895), p. 39 Published by Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc 10 Ibid.

11 Cold Storage Rats and Cats. Scientific American, Vol. 71, No. 11 (September 15, 1894), p. 168 Published by Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc

28

12

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 1888.

13

Osman, Michael. Modernisms Visible Hand, Architec-

ture and Regulation in America, The Thermostatic Interior, Cold Storage and the Speculative Market of Preserved Assets. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

14 Information regarding PFS Elizabeth is based on the site visit of the author, all information was provided to him by floor manager Patrick Ternyila and sales manager Justin Harris. All photographs have been permited by the floor manager to be used in this paper.

15

Ibid, 2018.

16 Ure, Andrew. An Account of Some Experiments Made on the Body of a Criminal Immediately after Execution, with Physiological and Practical Observations. Journal of Science and the Arts 6 (1819): 290.

17 Osman, Michael. Modernisms Visible Hand, Architecture and Regulation in America 18 “Biggest in the World,” Chicago Daily Tribune (November 14, 1890) 19 Ibid.

20 Osman, Michael. Regulation, Architecture and Modernism in the United States, 1890-1920. PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008.

21 Osman, Michael. "Listening to the Cooler." Cabinet, Logistics, no. 47 (Fall 2012): 85-87.

Osman’s careful historical retellings of modernisms existence through the lens of devices such as the thermostat and thermophone provides a lens to understand the regulation of the new modern interiors were not only as important as creating the modernist movement but made it possible. Considering economic factors, such as the creation of commodities such as pineapples and bananas, Osman details a modernist tale of cheating nature, essentially neutralizing it fix economic ends.

22 Moore, Jason W. The Rise of Cheap Nature, 2016. Sociology Faculty Scholarship.

23 Twilley, Nicola. "The Coldscape." Cabinet, Logistics, no.

47 (Fall 2012): 80-84.

29

Twilley’s careful description of food to cold chain logistic relationships materialize an under speculated world of refrigerated landscapes. Entangling various infrastructures essential to the seamlessness of everyday goods such as sushi and bananas.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Ibid.

27 Trebilcock, Bob. Preferred Freezer Services: Very cool automation, Logistic Management, February 2012.

28 RKB Architects. Inc, Preferred Freezer Services, www. rkbarch.com/preferred-freezer (Accessed October 2018) 29 Harris, Jim. Deep Freeze, Construction Today: Industrial, January-February 2015, pg 152-163.

30 Banham, Reyner; Dallegret, François. A Home is Not a House. 1965 31 Harwood, John. The White Room: Elliot Noyes and the Logic of the Information Age Interior, Grey Room. No 12 (Summer, 2003) pg 5-31, The MIT Press.

32 Ibid.

33 Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1934 34 Ibid.

35 Latour, Bruno. A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design, Keynote lecture, Networks of Design, Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, September 3, 2008 36 Banham, Reyner. The architecture of the well-tempered environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

37 Osman, Michael. Modernisms Visible Hand, Architecture and Regulation in America 38 Ibid.

39 Harris, Jim. Deep Freeze, Construction Today: Industrial, January-February 2015, pg 152-163.

40 Ibid.

30

41 Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

42 Haraway, Donna J. A Cyborg Manifesto SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIALIST - FEMINISM IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY, 1984.

“Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs—creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted.”

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs.”

43 Turner, Christopher. Ingestion/ Planet in a bottle. Cabinet, Infrastructure, no. 41 (Spring 2011): 18-21.

44 Truckload of heisted shrimp recovered, Seafoodsource.com, June 14, 2011 45 Reward offered for heisted shrimp, Seafoodsource.com, June 9, 2011 46 Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016.

“The earth of the ongoing Chthulucene is sympoietic, not autopoietic.” “If it is true that neither biology nor philosophy any longer supports the notion of independent organisms in environments, that is, interacting units plus contexts/ rules, then sympoiesis is the name of the game in spades.”

“It matters what worlds world worlds.”

47 DENFELD, ZACK; KRAMER, CATHRINE, Works, CenterforGenomicGastronomy.com 48 Hird, Myra J. Waste, Landfills, and an Environmental Ethic of Vulnerability. Ethics and the Environment, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring 2013, pg. 105-124, Indiana University Press.

49 Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016.

31

32

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Infrastructural Imaginaries MIP 675: Elements of Infrastructure Planning Fall 2018 New Jersey School of Architecture

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