MACHINE SPECTACLE
INVERSION OF A TYRE FACTORY
Outside our cities is a landscape of production hidden between the outer ring road and the highway. It’s a sprawling area filled with facilities that, like a critical organ, supports and enables our way of life. But it is also an area that is increasingly being abandoned by humans and overtaken by autonomous machines. Boxed in and hidden away from public interaction, this landscape of distribution centers, server farms and fully automated factories, is an alternative reality to our city centers - and our cities identity
The increasing presence of machines and sensors in our environment has a potential to change the architectural language. Buildings dedicated to the manufacture of machines used to be defined as industrial halls surrounded by other functions dedicated to workers and management. This is because machines required operators.
Today the modern factory is increasinly occuppied and operated by machines. Equipped with inexpensive sensors the machines are able to navigate space, interact with each other, and help the few people left in the factory, or in a control room far away - creating a need for a purely machine space.
The symphony of machines in a tyre factory is a visual spectacle. The industrical production is typically hidden away in suburbs, but by bringing it back into the city, a new relationship can be established between humans and machines. Creating a collective awareness about our modern society, and the massive infrastructure that facilitates it. A factory inversion.
