While landscape architecture and planning tend to approach logistics infrastructures by finding appropriate, “out of sight” locations, Stefano Corbo’s book Exteriorless: Form, Space, and Urbanities of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2023) uncovers their embeddedness in the globalized context of neoliberalism from an architectural viewpoint. Warehouse architecture, with its seemingly vulgar, opaque exterior, contains complex operations, robotic, human, and non-human, choreographed into a wider apparatus of global capitalist extraction. This apparatus reaches ports, data centers, and digital platforms, often running through privatized critical infrastructures and forms of urbanism. EXTERIORLESS is the term Corbo coined to investigate this condition: a spatial byproduct that signifies the entanglement of capitalism and society. However gloomy, the analysis Corbo offers is meant as groundwork for action, not resignation.
Stefano Corbo, with whom we spoke about the exteriorless condition, is an architect and researcher. He teaches at TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment – Group of Public Building.
EXTERIORLESS points to a set of societal, economic, and spatial conditions. What typologies make up an EXTERIORLESS?
The term EXTERIORLESS originates from my book Exteriorless: Form, Space, and Urbanities of Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2023). It describes a subtle yet pervasive condition that, yes, has to do with buildings, but that also has a broader, decisive impact – physical, cultural, and environmental – on the transformation of our urban and peri-urban areas.
Over the past decades, a series of new building types connected to the production, distribution, and delivery of commodities have proliferated: distribution centres, sorting facilities, container terminals, greenhouses, agro-industrial hubs, and so on. These architectures of logistics have become a key factor in the spatial organisation of our cities – even if, at first glance, they can look like just another variation on warehousing space.
Despite the diversity of functions they accommodate, all of these structures share a common condition: their spatial organisation is generic, their interiors vast, their exteriors hermetic. I call this shared, expanded and at the same time introverted condition EXTERIORLESS. These spaces are usually treated as anonymous, purely utilitarian structures – outside the scope of architectural investigation. I argue the opposite: these building types represent a new frontier for architecture and for the public realm. Understanding them – and redesigning them – will help us build a more just, sustainable, and inclusive built environment.
To rethink how these structures work and how they connect to their surrounding context doesn’t mean advocating for their disappearance or sabotaging the activities happening inside them. It means implementing design strategies that can hybridise the EXTERIORLESS with spaces and facilities open to the collectivity (parks, rooftop playgrounds or gardens, cultural centres, etc.); scale down their physical and environmental impact; optimise their energy efficiency; or rethink their role in activating positive urban dynamics.
Can you describe the connection, or dissociation, between EXTERIORLESS and territory?
Since the book EXTERIORLESS, I have continued investigating this topic through different means and formats. Progressively, this research focus has translated into other books – one of which will be published next year, titled Rethinking the Ordinary (TU Delft Open Publishing) – but also drawings, research-by-design projects, exhibitions, and teaching activities. All of these different formats have allowed me to verify that EXTERIORLESS is a condition that goes beyond the physicality of architecture – as your question suggests.
In this respect, I would say that my work sits within the field of study known as supply studies, which analyses the macroeconomic, social, and infrastructural dynamics that make logistics a determining factor in the transformation of territories. My aim is to contribute to this field specifically from an architectural and typological perspective, distinguishing my work from well-established urban or territorial planning approaches. In a sense, mine is an analysis of global phenomena and urban systems from “within” – starting from the scale of the buildings that make global trade possible.
An example that is somewhat paradigmatic of this approach comes from the U.S. – from the work of Jesse LeCavalier on Walmart – an American retail corporation that operates worldwide chains of department stores, grocery stores, pharmacies and petrol stations. Walmart is today one of the largest retail companies in the world by revenue, and one of the largest private employers as well. LeCavalier analysed the relationship between Walmart’s strategies of expansion and their physical impact on entire regions and landscapes: he categorised the buildings that make up Walmart’s logistics network according to their internal layout, their formal characteristics and their functioning, in order to understand how invasive – but also extremely efficient – Walmart’s physical and economic empire is. The outcome of this investigation was a book called The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment.
Can you describe the reciprocity between function and form in EXTERIORLESS? Besides capital flow, what else do these structures follow?
This question reminds me of a book by Dara Orenstein, titled Out of Stock. In her essay, Orenstein traces a kind of historical genealogy of warehouses, arguing that mapping the evolution of warehousing spaces means, to some extent, tracing the evolution of capitalism in its modes of production and consumption. I think the same applies to the EXTERIORLESS condition I attempt to analyse in my work. By studying its architectures, we can begin to comprehend the entanglement between space and capital.
So, to answer your question: rather than focusing attention on the form-function formula, EXTERIORLESS pushes us to pay attention to something else. Distribution and fulfilment centres, container terminals, packaging, handling, and storage areas matter less for their expressive or formal characteristics than for what I would call their deep spatial, environmental, and technological significance.
First, they act as nodes within global networks that connect regions, countries, and continents. Their significance lies in being physically anchored within a specific local context while remaining inextricably linked to a vast, ramified, global network. Second, these buildings exert an environmental impact that is frequently devastating. This footprint is quantifiable not only through substantial CO2 emissions and waste-management demands, but also in how their presence alters surrounding areas and potentially exacerbates socio-spatial inequalities. The future sustainability of global supply chains thus hinges on how their architectures are designed and woven into their context. Lastly, technology is increasingly pervasive within these structures. In many instances, the architectures of logistics are no longer designed for human inhabitation; within their vast interiors, humans are becoming foreigners, superseded by logistics bots and mobile shelving units, autonomous cranes and driverless vehicles. These emerging facilities form an ecosystem that is at once physical and ethereal, wireless and wired – embodying what Shannon Mattern describes as a convergence of code and clay.
Who works inside the EXTERIORLESS, and who benefits from it? How do you see designing for human and non-human?
This is an extremely relevant question, and it connects to the role technology plays inside most exteriorless spaces. It is also something I have recently been exploring in parallel projects, trying to understand how the EXTERIORLESS creates or describes new forms of labour, in which humans are progressively replaced by non-human agents.
Developments in automation are producing multiple results. Most obviously, they affect how the architectures of logistics are designed. For example, while distribution centres and warehouses are traditionally associated with single-floor, horizontal structures, the use of automated cranes is now making it possible to go vertical – increasing the overall height of warehouses to host more goods and optimise circulation.
At the same time, automation also triggers forms of subjectivity that raise a broader question: who are we, as designers, designing for? If you think of spaces like container terminals, but also data centres, it seems the goal of the designer is increasingly to envision spaces from which human presence is excluded. Server racks, automated vechicles, robots, are the actual occupants of these spaces. In this ever-changing scenario, I’m personally interested in understanding how spatial conditions influence the possible coexistence between human and non-human actors. This interest has translated so far into didactic experiments, but also, for example, into organising international symposia on the nature and role of “occupants” in architecture – how do we define the term “occupant” nowadays, and what does it imply?
The entanglement of each of us with EXTERIORLESS is too great to comprehend, stop, or amend. In the studio you lead at TU Delft, you guided students in rethinking spatial organization and structural embeddedness in the urban tissue. What did they learn from the research?
In my work with students, we especially experiment with the deep interconnection between research and design. We treat design work as a legitimate mode of inquiry, one in which theory and practice, analysis and speculation, converge to generate architectural knowledge. Consistent with this premise, rethinking the spatial organisation of generic, ordinary architectures involved in supply chains is not, in itself, the ultimate goal of students’ work. By redesigning these architectures, students come to understand broader phenomena, can assess the impact architecture has at the urban and landscape scale, and can reflect on the processes of spatial segregation that make our cities increasingly privatised in their access. In this respect, architecture becomes a pretext for investigating broader issues.
One example that comes to my mind is a project by a group of students, focused on the cocoa supply chain. While cocoa is not technically “produced” in the Netherlands, it is imported, processed and then re-exported from the Netherlands to countries such as China, the United States, Germany, France, and Italy. All the cocoa-related processing facilities are concentrated in one specific area of the country, along the Zaan river. Investigating the spatial systems connected to the cocoa supply chains allowed the students to unveil global histories of environmental destruction, extractivism and labour exploitation, and to use architectural transformation (in the Netherlands) to raise awareness of these issues.
How does one penetrate the EXTERIORLESS? As a symptom of capitalism and over-consumption, it seems there’s no way out short of collapse. Is there an INTERIORFULL — or where is the limit of EXTERIORLESS?
If you think of Archizoom’s project No-Stop City (1969), the city of capital is represented as a continuous, potentially infinite, formless environment. The EXTERIORLESS somehow follows a similar logic, but from within – from the millions of generic, introverted containers that invade our cities. Its extensiveness and pervasiveness are invisible, yet it moves across continents, nations, oceans. Perhaps the question we have to ask ourselves is not whether there will be a collapse or implosion, but rather that, before asking that question, we need to critically address the EXTERIORLESS as a whole, since we have long ignored or overlooked these spaces. Maybe it’s time for us – designers, planners, urbanists – to consider the role they play, and to scrutinise them properly.
