Year: 2017
Project team: Neyran Turan, Zhifei Xu, Isabella Warren-Mohr.
Interior space has swallowed the Earth. Some call it the endless interior. Others question the contemporaneity of this condition and claim that it has always been about the interior, and that we simply did not know it. After all, they say, what we call territory is nothing more than a kind of planetary interior. Thinking of the giant air-conditioned interiors of assembly plants, warehouses, self-storage buildings, flower markets, convention centers, distribution centers, and office buildings, there is more to these interiors beyond their immense scale and ubiquity, however. First, consider their specific architectural manifestation of accumulation. As containers of an exponentially growing multiplication of cabinet of curiosities, they are contemporary monuments of constant collecting, accumulating and trashing of “stuff,” simply all that is junk of the junk-space. Second, despite the piles of material that they contain—from architectural elements, to material specification, to the various scales of objects—their exterior is almost always blank.
Flatbed Junk is a very large building that treats the satellite image view of the roof as a territorial relief canvas. Its flat reading is fake as it mischievously hides its architectural content. All that junk reads mute when it is flat.