The architectures of capitalist development’s present phase manifest themselves through a very diverse range of episodes: data centers, warehouses, container terminals, logistics parks. Generally considered as mediocre and banal examples that sit outside of pre-established disciplinary canons, these artifacts are extremely relevant. They are relevant not for their formal or historic qualities, but for what they represent - for the implicit system of values they embed. They express specific power relations, exacerbate issues of labor, and generate processes of subjectivity. Most importantly, these architectures, despite their formal and typological diversity, share a common ground. They depict a sort of inner and extended paradigm: the EXTERIORLESS.
How can an architecture of the EXTERIORLESS be defined? How does it differentiate from examples and manifestations of the past? How do notions of legibility, form vs. function, typological articulation, come into play?
In situating the architectures of contemporary capitalism within the larger debate on Anthropocene, Post- Anthropocene and Capitalocene, this book attempts to answer those questions by delineating three main characteristics for an architecture of the EXTERIORLESS: its physical and symbolic role as interface; its ambiguous condition of being at the same time local and global, isolated and connected, compressed and expanded; and, lastly, its contribution to new forms of urbanity in absence of the traditional city. These three aspects-Interface, Expanded Domains, and New Forms of Urbanity-constitute the three main sections of the book. Each section includes two chapters and examines one specific aspect of the EXTERIORLESS paradigm. Defining its three main characteristics, this book covers a wide spectrum of themes and examples. It describes the influence that the experimental architecture of the 1960s has exerted on late-capitalist spatial products; it analyzes the impact of logistics on the redesign of the territory; it introduces new forms of global urbanity generated by the EXTERIORLESS.
Written for students and scholars of architectural history, theory and criticism, Stefano Corbo contextualizes the concept of EXTERIORLESS and its role in contemporary architecture, its obedience to macro-economic dynamics, and its possible future.
