What is a factory?

as a communitarian landscape

In a town far away, stood these mighty sheds, side by side. By looks, they seemed to have fought in a war together but by the silence, they seemed unknown to each other. Humans seemed to be only a shred of connection, always making their way from one to another.

As he walked closer, the noises grew louder. He stood at the threshold and let his eyes wander through the panorama of infrastructure made by machines. Some emerging from the floor and disappearing into the ceiling, some slender, some humongous, all creating a complex landscape for humans to meander in. As he ascended higher, the landscape became more complex. Wandering through the alleys in between, he felt small and lost. The din, even louder now, had almost become white noise after the time he had spent with it. He realized the noise had grown enough to drown him out. He wondered if a shout for help would ever be heard in this din.

Stepping out of this realm of machinery became their moments of pause. Sitting outside the façade, on the ground, on the motorcycles, they savored the few moments they could hear another human voice and respond back audibly. There were men and women working in the shed. Some stood behind the machines, some sat beside it whereas others were busy playing Legos with the gunny bags. The colossal shed amplified the mechanical cacophony loud enough to not hear your own thoughts, let alone others’. The people worked, and worked, and worked; not talking to anybody, not unlike their lifeless automated colleagues.

Site

Entrance on the right

Interstitial corners

Site

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The clock struck eight and in a matter of minutes the screaming machines became deadly silent. She felt eerily alone standing in the colossal shed surrounded by gunny bags towering above her. She could suddenly hear echo of the human chatter and followed it, navigating her way to her co-workers. With them alongside, she exited the sheds. They stood outside for a few minutes and dispersed quickly. Everybody was tired. She herself has to get back to her children, who were alone and probably hungry. her ten-year-old daughter must’ve started making dinner and she didn’t want her to do it all by herself. Again.

The room became a sanctuary. Or maybe an island. He and his friends/colleagues spent all their time there. They ate their lunch at 1:00 together in one of the rooms, sitting in any nook or corner they could find, occupying the already overcrowded room from wall to wall. They even had the barber make home calls for them. They spent their Sundays here, eating, day-drinking and sleeping, completely detached and aloof from the world beyond the site perimeter.

His wishful thinking took hold and he began thinking of possibilities of connecting these isolated, island-like spatial experiences and induce a method of connection and communication. He located the nodes and junctions he could use to create any and all sense of connections. He envisioned a spine of the site, the spaces where its inhabitants spend almost all of their time. He wondered if these secluded social conditions could be improved by introducing another organ to this whole body. He thought of a parasite, that spreads its effects in all directions. He thought of an octopus, whose numbered limbs move in all directions. He thought of the communitarian spatial nodes and junctions along the spine that spread its arms in various directions, rupturing through barriers, creating visual connections and places of pause and rests in its way.

Process