A Speculation, Publication, and Exhibition on Machines, Labor, and the Environment

2018

Supernormal's proposal for Dry Dock No. 4, an invited contribution to the Boston Society of Architects' Spring 2018 issue of Architecture Boston and corollary exhibition at the BSA Space in 2018, imagines a reuse of the pier that combines waterfront leisure with marine industrial uses in a future world with alternate manufacturing and labor conditions. See the full set of proposals here. Here’s a very, very short essay we wrote about the work, entitled The Marine Industrial Cloud:

Having handed over labor to machines, human labor is unnecessary in the Marine Industrial Park in 2067. Society has shifted to a universal basic income to equitably and unconditionally distribute the unneeded salaries of the machines for human use, and Bostonians now pursue human interests in social settings that coexist in parallel with the machine labor that enables them. Given its proximity to the water and the continuing need of humans to utilize ocean resources, the Marine Industrial Park maintains maritime industrial use as a primary function. While zoning remains unchanged, the efficiency of robotic labor liberates ground levels and areas with the vistas that Bostonians appreciate, for public leisure and the pursuit of a new form of human work. Drydock 4 is typical of the building and development types produced by this new economic condition, which leverage the stripped-down needs of machine production to fundamentally reshape the constraints of building and site design. Seen from below, a single symbiotic and fundamentally social experience emerges from the combination of human experience and the machine functions that enable it.