Amazon here

by

Anran Li

B.S. in Architecture (Hons), Stanford University, 2015

Yue (Chelsea) Qiu

Bachelor of Architectural Studies (Hons), University of Waterloo, 2015

Submitted to the Department of Architecture

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Architecture

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

February 2019

@

2019 Anran Li and Yue Qiu. All rights reserved.

The authors hereby grant to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and

electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium know known or

hereafter created.

Signature of Co-Author

Signature redacted

Department of Architecture

Signature of Co-Author

Signature redacted

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Certified

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Accepted by_______

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE Chair, Depa OF 'CHNSLOGY

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LIBRARIES

ARCHIVES

Department of Architecture

Jennifer W. Leung, Lecturer

Thesis Advisor

edacted-Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan Professor rtment Committee on Graduate Students

Amazon

Here

Co-Authors

Anran Li

B.S. in Architecture (Hons), Stanford University, 2015 Yue Chelsea Qiu

Bachelor of Architectural Studies (Hons), University of Waterloo, 2015

Thesis Advisor

Jennifer W. Leung Lecturer

Department of Architecture, MIT

Thesis Readers

Andrew Scott

Professor of Architecture + Urbanism Department Head

Department of Architecture, MIT Mark Jarzombek, PhD

Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture Department of Architecture, MIT

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Amazon

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Co-Authors

Anran Li and Yue (Chelsea) Qiu

Advisor

Jennifer W. Leung

Submitted to the Department of Architecture on January 17, 2019 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Architecture.

ABSTRACT

Tech companies, bearing money, jobs and innovations assume state-level responsibilities and take on projects that address urban issues. Uber rethinks public transit; Google Sidewalk Labs designs Toronto's waterfront with integrated mobility system; Elon Musk's Boring Company privately funds a rapid transit line from O'Hare Airport to downtown; Amazon provides CIA data and security services for sensitive information. Willingly or reluctantly, governments are handing over civic infrastructure to these companies. While reshaping the public realm at an

unprecedented pace, tech companies also put public spaces at risk. In negotiation of mega-corporation tenancy, as seen in Amazon's RFP for its second headquarters, space becomes a bargaining chip between misaligned agendas of companies and governments. This thesis investigates the unusual architectural opportunities this risk could bring to the city, the corporation, and the citizens while acknowledging that machines, supported by automation, are progressively reorganizing our

environment and we are surrendering ourcontrol in gradual but consequential ways.

Amazon Here is our case study in the urban context of Chicago, an abandoned historic building retrofitted into a densely-packed, hyper-efficient machine that weaves together business and public-oriented spaces. This hypothetical development pushes for a model in which corporate-sponsored public architecture operates as the fourth industrial revolution's version of a company town, balancing Amazon's interests with those of the community. In this experimental model, public space is a negotiation for corporate and civic interest; hefty logistical infrastructure normally hidden behind closed doors now becomes part of the new urban experience, transforming the industrial warehouse into a spectacle for all.

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Table of Contents

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4-Abstract 005

Infrastructure is the New Home 011

N arration Part 1 ...

012

Infrastructural Site: Am azon ...

020

A m azon E-com merce... 030

A m azon W eb Services...

042

Urban Site: Chicago ... 054

A rchitectural Agenda ...

064

'The Immaterial is the New Poch6 067 N arration Part 2 ...

068

Chicago O ld M ain Post O ffice ... 0 76 Architectural Strategy... 080

Floor Plans... 084

007 Sections ... 092

Technology is the New Religion 107 N arration Part 3 ... 108

Renderings ... 112

Physical Representation... 122

Form s and Publications ... 126

Reflections... 136

Appendix 139 Thesis Presentation... 140

'The Suburban Tech Cam pus... 142

A Study of Company Towns... 154

Site Visits ... 168

Existing Building D rawing Package ... 188

Bibliography 203

008 Q) Q) c 0 N E

Acknowledgments

This thesis would not have been possible without the support we received from MIT's amazing faculty and our families and friends.

To Jennifer for your persistent engagement and enthusiasm throughout the development of this thesis. Thank you for embracing all our ideas and for being even crazier than us. Working with you was a truly

inspiring experience.

To Andrew and Mark for bringing insights into our project at key moments. You have expanded our vision beyond the initial scope.

To Joel for your inspiration at the early stage of our thesis.

To Duncan, Ezra, and Jonathan for offering new perspectives to our quest.

To our incredible last minute helpers, Mengqiao, Ziyu, Kyle-the-employee,

Flo, and Nare for generously giving

time and care to the final productions. So much would not have happened without your support.

To our fellow M.Archs for always

providing constructive criticism, mental support, food, drinks, and laughter.

To our families for your unconditional

love and support, for giving us the freedom to pursue our dreams, and for taking our mid-night phone calls when we need someone to talk to. None would have been possible without you.

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State and local property tax credits for Amazon:

State sates and use tax exemptions for construction materials and equipment;

$10 million each year (for 15 years) allocated to the state's existing Economic Development

Opportunities (aka Sunny Day) Fund: Road, transit, and infrastructure upgrades.

Incentives

City Responses to HQ2 RFP

Washington D.C.

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A five-year freeze on at least 50 percent of propertytxes for Amazon-occupied buildings:

Personal property tax exemptions on things like computers and tech equipment for ten years;

Sales tax exemption on qualified new purchases forever:

Up to $7,500 in relocation expense credits given to Amazon employees:

Corporate franchise tax deductions to the tune of $15 million:

A government funded Amazon University.

Incentives

City Responses to HQ2 RFP

Back in 2017, we asked cities to compete to be home to our second headquarters outside of Seattle.

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Chicago

About $2 biWon in perks. half of which will be funneled from Amazon employees income taxes back to the corporation.

$1.32 billion in EDGE tax credits available under Illinois law;

$250 million in workforce training grants: $172.5 million in sales tax and utilitytax deductions:

$61.4 million in property tax discounts:

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City Responses to HQ2 RFP

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We are bringing a condensed and commercialized version of distribution and data centers to downtown, upgraded with automation to fit in the smallest possible footprint. In doing this, we

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The first program is the e-commerce branch of Amazon. It is a smaller, more internal version of the fulfillment center for services like Amazon Fresh, Amazon

Basics, Amazon Go, and Amazon Now. Rather than having the fulfillment center far away from the city and away from research and development, the new fulfillment center is lean and smart, housing only the items that are most frequently requested and likely to be

purchased based on user data.

The new fulfillment center anticipates the arrival of autonomous technologies and posts the design challenge of which human is no longer the only active occupant in the architecture. For example, in this new typology, the conventional use of leveled floors for human inhabitation becomes secondary to the vast space required for robots to sort, deliver and store items within the building. Priority is 030 given to a spatial organization that is most energy efficient and cost effective. Aerial photographs of various Amazon fulfillment centers in the US are shown on the opposite page. A typical fulfillment center is a single-story rectangular box in a suburban area, close to a highway network. It has a 1:2 aspect ratio in plan, with roughly

1 million square feet of floor space.

40% of the building footprint has a two-story mezzanine space for stacked storage. One long side of the building is the main entrance, facing employee parking. The back side is truck loading.

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Loading Dock Storage

Top: Palettes of merchandise are Bottom: Amazon's new KIVA robots unloaded from trucks and trailers. carry stacks to stockers and pickers. Workers unbox all materials at the Chaotic storage stocks items randomly receiving stations and put individual in shelving stacks. Each bin in a stack items on conveyor belts to be stored. has a unique identifying barcode that

0 Packaging boxes are put on a separate allows workers to record and locate an

belt to be collected and recycled. item easily.

Dispatch

Top: When an order is picked, the parcel is automatically labeled and scanned for departure. Scanners read the barcode on the box and direct the parcel to the appropriate waiting trailer.

Administration

Bottom: The building has a single entrance with an ID reader. In proximity are offices, classrooms and amenities. Areas that require safety protection are clearly demarcated on the floor with warning tape. Workers get personal protective equipment from vending machines in the building.

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Circulation: Storage = 2.30:1

This model is used by most of Amazon's fulfillment centers in the US. Storage density is limited by the height of human reach and the need for aisles to be wide enough for two workers with bins to pass.

Workers are augmented by a range of technologies to efficiently navigate the storage stacks to stock and pick items. They work 10.5-hour shifts for four days a week and walk up to 11 miles on each shift. Orders are given every 33 seconds.

Stocking: Manual Picking: Manual Palletizing: Automatic Storage: Single-floor matrix

Carried by robot Circulation: Storage = 0.82:1

The current generation of warehouse "employs" about 1,500 Kiva robots. The robots bring storage stacks to workers at their station. Algorithms assign robots to a prescribed path which they can transport shelves without colliding. Aisles are designed for one robot with stack to pass, greatly increasing density. Workers get instruction on a screen to locate items to put in a bin. With the robot system, productivity is reported to increase by 50%. 036 QJ L Q) 0 N (U E IT

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Storage: Stacked in circular form Rotates vertically Circulation: Storage <= 0.80:1

If the height of storage stacks is liberated with the use of a robotic arm that can freely move vertically to stock and pick items, it will allow the company to capitalize on a taller, denser storage system that fits the same volume of merchandise on smaller real estate.

Post Office Model

A diagram from a 1931 issue of Popular

Science (right) explains the logistics of

the Old Chicago Main Post Office as a mix of manual and machine work. Conveyor belts transport mails and packages across the building but the majority of the sorting was done

by hand. Workers worked at their

designated stations on prescribed tasks, operating seamlessly in sync with the pace of the machine.

The old post office model involves three steps: collection, sortation and distribution. A high percentage of floor space is dedicated to sorting and storing. Today, bar codes, RFID and other smart labels enable some degree of automated sorting and tracking.

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The post office model isthe predecessor

of product fulfillment as they are both systems of recording, sorting, and distributing large volumes of incoming goods to their final destinations.

Amazon's fulfillment infrastructure

short circuits the traditional way of merchandise flow, delivering faster services. They are made available to sellers to store their products and use the company's picking and packing services.

Shipping

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Amazon Web Services is also built on the same site. The Data Center provides content and media services to the public such as cloud computing and hosting, as well as digital content such as e-books, movies, TV shows, and other platforms. The center is comprised of a loading facility, a corefor data infrastructure, and management offices. Located in downtown, the data center allows businesses to transfer exabytes of data physically to the cloud via a truck (AWS Snowmobile) or a train, which is fast and cost effective.

Up to 100 petabytes can be transferred

on a 45-foot long shipping container. It would only take 6 months to transfer one exabyte (1 000PB) on Snowmobiles compared to 26 years on a 10Gbps dedicated connection (Amazon AWS). With Amazon's data center in the city, Chicago becomes the true center of a vast network, a gateway for the

042 distribution of both the physical and the digital.

Aerial photographs of various Amazon data centers in the US and Ireland (last row) are shown on the opposite page.

A typical data center is a single-story

building located in a suburban area with 200 thousand square feet. It is common to have multiple data centers on the same site.

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Power Station

Top: Each data center has an on-site power substation that reduces the voltage of AC entering the site and sends the lower voltage electric current to other power distribution centers. In case of power lost, multiple generator and utility backup sources are available to maintain power to the servers.

Server Racks

Bottom: Access to the server stack is restricted. The company uses biometric data to ensure security. The server clusters are designed to be scalable and efficient. All centers are connected to a backbone network that allow them to communicate and access data in other locations.

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Ventilation RTU

Top: The mechanical equipment room Bottom: To maintain high energy has a condenser water loop and a efficiency, warm exhaust air from the process water loop to cool the building. server stacks is never mixed with cool Hot air is transfered from the server supply air. RTUs (rooftop air handling room to the heat exchangers and units) assist in providing HVAC to spaces cooled using water. Cooling towers use below.

evaporation to rapidly cool the water from the condenser loop.

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Servers sit on a raised floor which cool air supply circulates up through floor grille located at strategic places. Cool air collects heat from the servers and rises up. A CRAC unit (computer room air conditioning) collects the hot air to be re-conditioned. A fan at the bottom of the unit forces cooled air back into the floor.

Because of the single-directional orientation, warm discharge air may sometimes be pulled by the air intake of the row of servers behind it. Mixing air temperature air temperature means high energy consumption and high failure rate.

Hot and Cold Aisles

Separating cold and warm air means the servers would only receive fresh cool air and the CRAC unit would only receive warm discharge air. Cold air from the floor is pulled from the front of the servers and exhausted to the back. Warm air rises and is pulled back to the

CRAC units.

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An improvement to the hot and cold aisle strategy is to contain the cool air. Two facing rows of servers are contained in a chamber with cool air supply. Hot air is discharged from the back and fills the rest of the room. While it is relatively easy and cheap to implement, it also means that any equipment located outside the cold zone would only receive hot air.

Hot Aisle Containment

A more expensive but efficient alternative is to contain the discharge air. Warm air is pushed to the return air plenum space above the ceiling before being pulled to the CRAC units for recirculation. Cold air fills the rest of the room. This provides superior cooling performance. Should the AC unit fail, this system also offers additional buffer

cooling to the room.

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Railway Model

The railway model can be seen as a vast web with nodes of concentrated traffic that act as points of exchange. The web consists of multiple layers of webs, like freight shipments and passenger services. A series of sub-networks operates within each node to densify its local connectivity.

With its immense network tying the nation's goods and passengers together, Chicago is one of the major nodes of the web. The first railroads were built in mid 1800s to link the city to lead mines, wheat fields, and locomotive factories, boosting these industries. Chicago has since become the center for manufacturing and production.

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Both the railroad and the Internet can be understood as a network infrastructure. Before the Internet, telecommunication companies used rail and highway right-of-way to run their cable networks in order to avoid having to negotiate easement with individual landowners. This becomes a model for the Internet, which resembles the railroad, with data-carrying virtual tracks.

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The Internet is far from being open and distributed as it was first conceived. Data centers collect our information under the services by a few providers, like Google and Amazon Web Services, giving tremendous power to technology corporations. This situation resembles that of the monopolization of railroads, in which tycoons oversaw the construction of many railroads and expanded their power through the Interstate Commerce Commission

(ICC).

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) high-level APIs

supplies IT infrastructure on-demand from data centers Virtual Machines

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Learning from this model, Amazon designs its data infrastructure to short circuit the traditional paths of data flow, cutting time and resources, becoming the sole middleman in many cases.

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Urban Site: Chicago

The history of the City of Chicago has traditionally been about mobility and production. Today, however, it is at the center of the Rust Belt of American production.

As a main node of an extensive railroad network, Chicago serves as a major gateway for distribution of goods. Rail-based commerce prospered in the 19th century and the city has become the powerhouse for manufacturing. For example, the historic Pullman town south of Chicago was built in the 1 880s as a company town for railroad cars. The Chicago Assembly, which started operation in 1924, is Ford Motor's oldest automobile manufacturing plant.

Chicago is also a heated ground for radical architectural proposals. Most pertinent to our thesis would be a proposal published nationally in 1928,

054 in which D. H. Burnham & Co. imagined a monumental "skyscraper bridge" over Grand Park and the lake-front. Under this bridge, arches would span on top of buildings as tall as twenty-five stories. Over the years, the complex overlapping layers of transit networks has called for unique architectural solutions.

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Chicago is also an appropriate site

for architectural reasons. Chicago's bid for Amazon's HQ2 offers one of

the strongest financial and cultural

incentives while the city is highly

resilient to any urban impacts the

corporation may bring, like housing stock depletion and rent surge. Our analysis shows the metrics of Chicago compared with other finalist cities.

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Mooring Masts

The average commute time in Chicago is 31 minutes according to Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). As shown in patent drawings, Amazon's future strategy may be to have an air-based delivery, avoiding the need to rely on existing infrastructure.

A mooring mast is used when it is

inconvenient to dock an airship into its hangers. If a mooring cup is constructed at the tip of a tower, an airship can dock by connecting its mooring cone at the nose of the ship to the cup. The mooring technology was developed in 1920s and will be useful in an urban

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setting as the dimensions of city streets cannot usually accommodate the size of airships. This method also does not

require a ground crew.

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Air rights allow developers to buy unused air space over low buildings and build on top of existing structures. The City of Chicago has a history of utilizing air-rights to densify the city. The Millennium Park and the Riverside Plaza developments are both examples of successful public and commercial spaces created on top of railroad tracks. Architects and planners have fantasized about a stratified city over the last decade. Structures bridging between multiple buildings would knit the city together above ground level, providing

a second level of connectivity.

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Architectural Agenda

There is a symbiotic relationship between the parasitic fulfillment/ data center and the public structure, which suggests a collaborative bond between the corporation and the state. The existing structures provide the necessary access and basic amenities for the operations point to connect to urban live, while the operations point shares unrivaled public space with the

city.

This would constitute an architecture that is driven by data, analytics, and automation technologies.

The image projected by forward-looking tech corporations is ostensibly liberal, while the lack of privacy for consumers belies strictly authoritarian

measures.

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An Amazon worker talks about his job as an autonomous operations overseer at Amazon Here.

[AMAZON HERE WORKER]

My grandpa used to process catalogue fulfillment in this building. Luckily my job doesn't

involve intense physical labor like his did, as my work is to oversee autonomous operations of the fulfillment and data centers. I love working with the robots, but it also means that I have very few coworkers.

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The efficiency of previous

generations of fulfillment centers has improved tremendously in the past decades. Hundreds of pickers who had to navigate between rows of shelves to pick out items were later assisted by Kiva robots.

In the current facility, we deploy a vertical system designed for autonomous pickers, which densifies storage and saves floor space. To me, this is a modern version of a company town, where the new form of labor becomes the organizer of industrial space.

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It kind of reminds me of a pigeon tower, especially since drones are the new pigeons. Our drone network makes deliveries within a 15-mile

radius in under 30 minutes.

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The new typology creates a unique At Amazon Here, servers are

interstitial space between servers arranged into towers to facilitate

for visitors, and the water stack effect ventilation and

reservoir is stored as an indoor liquid cooling.

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Our data centers serve everyone. Local branches of the government, including libraries and CIA, are storing all of their digital contents here.

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And for the convenience of our clients, we have introduced the Data ATM, kiosks in the building where people can physically

deposit and retrieve data to avoid Internet surveillance. Business may also use them to upload their

petabytes of sensitive information brought in by our proprietary hard-drive trucks.

Welcome to Amazon Data ATM.

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Chicago Old Main Post Office

Prime land in downtown Chicago is highly limited, but the city is not unfamiliar with air right developments.

In 1929, the Chicago Daily News (now the North Riverside Plaza) built their office above Union Station tracks three blocks north of the passenger concourse. Subsequently, the Chicago Main Post Office opened in 1932, occupying two city blocks south of the concourse.

Millennium Park, a significant tourist attraction, also sits on top of a rail yard and surface parking lots.

Leasing air space from government-owned land also gives tech companies a financial advantage over developers. In commercial transactions, financing can be tricky for developers, since there is no bank financing for air rights,

as there is no collateral.

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Architectural Strategy

This thesis investigates the agency architecture has to spatialize the hidden operations of Amazon (and tech companies in general) to help users regain awareness and the capacity to control.

On an architectural scale, the adaptive reuse of the massive building of Chicago's Old Main Post Office calls for a way to divide the massive volume into smaller "buildings" to house the different services Amazon offers.

The goal of programming is to bring as much value to the corporation, the city, and consumers.

In this future building, the spatial relationship between humans and machines has been reversed - when design is based on mechanical efficiency, humans are left to occupy interstitial spaces. As machines progressively reorganize our environment, we are surrendering our control in gradual but consequential ways.

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Diagrammatic rendering showing three-dimensional packing of programs in the footprint of Chicago's Old Main Post Office.

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Floor plates are maintained along the perimeter for human occupation, producing four facades that would give out a more friendly image as the

building interfaces with the city. The only portion of the facade altered

is the droneport facing downtown.

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hollowed out for heavy infrastructure and machines. It is the site for the next generation fulfillment center and data center. These two programs are usually built in suburban areas because of their immense size, but in this urban version, they respond to city needs.

The fulfillment center is also site for shopping experience and the data center acts as a digital library that accommodates for information browsing. We intend that these traditionally exclusive spaces will

become open to everyone.

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