The Choreography of Piling: Active Industry in the City

Gravel, salt, sand, cobbles, and scrap metal – dry bulk materials fundamental to making and maintaining the built environment – are piled in or around coastal cities. The pile is the architecture of the holding stage between a material’s arrival and accumulation from one mode (such as ship or rail) and its distribution into the city through another (most commonly, the truck). Although these piles often approach the scale of large buildings and natural landforms, and their presence is a fixture in the built environment, they are overlooked as a matter of design. In recent decades, some artists and architects have explored piles and pile-making as an abstract formal condition or alternative to conventional modes of formal organization, but engaging the pile as an active form-making structure in the city has been confined to designating territories for piles through use based zoning protocols (“industrial”), or through the construction of containers to enclose them (sheds). Both of these standard practices fail to negotiate the distinctive qualities of piles as a temporary, kinetic, and authentic architecture in the city, and inhibit the collective engagement between the city and an expression of its global material footprint. This paper will explore the morphology of piles and present tactics for engaging them in pursuit of new notions of authenticity, monumentality, and temporality as a byproduct of global flow through three realized projects by our firm, Landing Studio, that choreograph the architecture of industrial road-salt piles in Boston and New York City.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2016.34

Volume Editors
Alfredo Andia, Dana Cupkova, Macarena Cortes, Umberto Bonomo & Vera Parlac

ISBN
978-1-944214-10-4