Some Dark Products

Our Dark Products is a travelogue tracing the online journey of nine architectural instruments, from renderings produced for the pleasure of airborne algorithms to digital models negotiating the online bureaucracies of copyright legislation. Each journey tells the fragmented story of our dark products. Rather than the extrinsic outcomes of creative intellection, these products are the disavowed networks produced by architects in order to organize the labor of design across enormous distances. They’re the even distribution of corporate offices across global time-zones, allowing the circulation of digital drawings to keep pace with the rotation of the earth. They’re the offsite rendering servers that compute the work of French visualization studios with the abundant oil reserves of the Brazilian rainforest. And they’re the networked drafting platforms that adjoin the high-value brains of designers in the first world with the low-cost drafting labor of CAD technicians in the third. Our Dark Products argues that to refashion the architectural imagination we must begin by asking our most prosaic instruments to evidence architecture in new ways. This proposition ultimately calls for nothing less than a new model of the architectural imagination itself, one capable of understanding the spatialized labor of architecture as a colossal work of architecture.