DELIVEROO AS PART OF A DIGITAL VERNACULAR New Architectural Typology That Is Unbuilding The City
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SORCHA McGARRY HUNT
Mario Carpo describes an “unprecedented state of data opulence, where more and more data are expected to be always more easily available at ever decreasing costs”. He continues, “today’s digital avantgarde has taken due notice ... and have started to use Big Data and computation… without the mediation of elegant, streamlined mathematical notations.” As Carpo says, this is the digital avantgarde, it is formal architecture. This paper observes that the same state of data opulence— its easy availability, and now the ability to store it in cloud based warehouses, and use it in real-time — is also being incorporated into vernacular architectural processes. The factories and mills of the Industrial Revolution had a profound and unplanned effect on the formation of today’s cities and their infrastructures. Today, new warehouses surround us in the cloud, negotiating data constantly produced by anyone who is online. This is a gradual process, which once again may be reforming, or perhaps even unbuilding cities and the way we live. Investigating these ideas, this paper asks if an example of a vernacular architectural equivalent to the digital avantgarde, is forming as a byproduct of the commercial objectives of Deliveroo - the online food delivery service. Both employ use of big data to create their form, the principle difference being, in the case of formal architecture, the data is deliberately manipulated by an architect or designer, whereas in the case of Deliveroo the data is organically manipulated, mass collaboratively, by 45,000 daily users. In 2015 Deliveroo reaffirmed their goal as not just to “make restaurant quality food more easily accessible – but to kill home cooking altogether.”1 In 2018 UBS investment bank published the report, “Is the kitchen Dead?” analysing the mega-trend of online food delivery,