Steel Cities – the Architecture of Logistics in Central and Eastern Europe. How fast and where are the new logistic parks and distribution centres rising which are needed for large companies and the growing sector of online shopping? The Czech Centre Berlin holds a discussion on the fast-growing logistic industry and its hugely problematic effects on the built environment, landscapes, societies, and individuals on March 24, 2021, 17:00 via live stream on Facebook and Youtube.

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The publication Steel Cities (edited by Kateřina Frejlachová, Miroslav Pazdera, Tadeáš Říha and Martin Špičák, Prague 2020) deals with the problems of the fast-growing logistics industry in Central and Eastern Europe from different point of views: urbanism, architecture, ecology and working/living conditions: The simplest possible architecture rigs up and wraps a complex of trivial processes of logistics. During the past three years the total area of warehouses in the Czech Republic has doubled. A combination of cheap labour, central location and a boom in online shopping is an ideal precondition for the current explosion of logistics parks. In relation to the GDP the Czech Republic has almost twice as many of them as Poland, and three times more than Hungary and Slovakia.

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Logistic parks are often built in island-like locations

However, if we are talking about warehouses growing, it is not to say that the cities grow with them. Often, what matters is the distance to the western border rather than the questionable purchasing power of the closest Czech city. For many distribution centres of large companies it is for the most part irrelevant if they are located near Pilsen, Prague or Ostrava. The logistic parks are often built in remote, island-like locations, with no access to public transport and amenities. Thousands of people from all around Czechia as well as from Romania or Ukraine not only work but sometimes also live in such places; in the middle of nowhere, next to the motorway, yet without a car. The logistics landscapes, which we only see as we pass by them on the road, are ‘inhabited’.

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Discussion on logistic industries as Steel Cities

Anh-Linh Ngo, editor of the German architectural magazine ARCH+ will hold the discussion with authors of the book Steel Cities, Miroslav Pazdera and Tadeáš Říha.

• March 24, 2021, 17:00 (CET)
• The lecture and discussion will be in English.
• Follow the live stream on the Facebook page and Youtube channel of the Czech Centre Berlin.

Read an article from the authors of the book Steel Cities about the Corridor 8, the Czech part of the motorway between Prague and the German city of Dresden, in topos 114 on fringes.

Professional photographer born in Lyon (France) in 1968, Cyrille Dubreuil, has been specialized himself in the fields of architecture, industry and construction for almost 20 years. Now based in New York, he pursues his own vision and photographic aesthetics of the city and urban landscapes.
In his photographic project “The Bow” he sensitively frames industrial halls in Europe and the USA and gives an insight into the subtle nuances of these ubiquitous landscapes.

How Cyrille Dubreuil introduces his photographs:

The fast acceleration of the online economy development and the e-commerce revolution has obviously changed the way people shop, but it also has somehow surreptitiously transformed discretely, but deeply, the landscape and architecture of our suburban areas. Companies design and build fulfillment centers to satisfy online orders as fast as possible, in the race against the clock for the expected next day or even same day delivery.

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In 2008 in the Landscape Journal, Charles Waldheim and Alan Berger had already observed that this new industrial trend “had produced a new form of landscape, a landscape of logistic”. They named it the “Logistic Landscape” defined as “among of the more significant transformations of the built environment over the past decade”. I witnessed firsthand how these logistic buildings have mushroomed and quietly transformed vast suburban areas. They move closer to the core of our cities, and their imposing architecture rapidly alters our environment. Through my lens I watch, as our landscape takes new and stranger forms, more alien shapes. I did not intend to focus on those forms at first, but somehow a pattern appeared when I saw all these images on my screen. In my eyes they emerge like huge cargo ships, exposing valiantly their bow to the horizon, ploughing through the waves. Their minimalistic bare walls possess a certain abstract purity and geometric photographic quality.

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The quietness that these buildings project is a sharp contrast to the once crowded and noisy shopping-malls, another “giant architecture”, which, in its time, had transformed our landscape. These former temples of frenzied consumption have been swept away by the waves of newer modern vessels firmly rooted in our lands. As time continues to pass to meet the demands of our click to order lifestyle, what else will change in our architecture?

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Conor O’Shea, Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (United-States), situates this collection of photographs within a broader geographic, infrastructural, and economic context:

In this era of online avatars, Amazon, and Alibaba it is easy to overlook the material consequences of our virtual behaviors. Acts such as online shopping coalesce to produce distinct geographies across the planet at multiple physical and temporal scales. In our global economy, all of the material goods we consume rely on a planetary web of highways, shipping lanes, and railroads that funnel trucks, ships, and trains carrying shipping containers filled with goods from sites of manufacturing to market

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Inland landscapes of logistics

While the shipping container is among the most visible symbols of global capitalism today, its architectural corollary — the industrial warehouse—is less so, blending into the peripheries of major cities, or occupying difficult-to-define territories far from traditional coastal port cities. Rising levels of e-commerce, fragmented global supply chains, and crowding along developed coasts has given rise to inland landscapes of logistics around the world.
As nodes in a thick interwoven network of industrial highways and double-stack rail corridors, these industrial buildings are neither the origin nor terminus of a product; they are unadorned, and engineered for efficiency. While physically opaque and removed from the public sphere, they both conceal and inadvertently express their function. Bays for truck trailer or railcar access hint to passersby the comings and goings of otherwise proprietary waybills.

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Sensitive framing of industrial warehouses

Granted rare access to many such sites as a professional industrial real estate photographer, the work of Cyrille Dubreuill reframes these overlooked sites for popular audiences. Ignored entirely by many, and characterized as homogenous by others, his sensitive framing of industrial warehouses in Europe and the United States offer glimpses into the subtle nuances of these ubiquitous landscapes.