- Somewhere in Portland, there’s a very old building, and that very old building has a very, very old basement. An incredible basement, a video-game-level basement, a set-decorator’s dream basement.
Nice one! Architecture as palimpsest. The concept of time is quite rich here. I love the idea that tubes are sending out microscopic information at macroscopic speeds while the building itself is working at a very different time scale. There is a short documentary called "Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors." that contains a more comprehensive discussion on the same topic. I must warn anyone before watching that it's extremely dry. The most interesting thing is their focus on 60 Hudson St in New York. Once the central telegraph hub, the building is now the cities central internet hub. One outtake:'It's particularly fascinating to see how 60 Hudson Street exhibits the "tendency of communications infrastructure to retrofit pre-existing networks to suit the needs of new technologies": the building became a modern internet hub primarily because it was already a hub in earlier communications networks, permeated by pneumatic tubes, telegraph cables, and telephone lines, and thus easily suited to the running of fiber-optic cables. This is important because it demonstrates the relative fixity of infrastructural geographies -- like the pattern of the cities they are embedded in, the positions of infrastructures tend to endure even as the infrastructures themselves decay and are replaced.'