PN ΠΠνΝύΥξΞ YX WEEKLY COMMENTARY, RESEARCH, AND REVIEW

June 21, 2019 ISSUE 70

IN THIS ISSUE, Alex Tell takes us to the the building’s fans and backup power. Above: View of 33 Thomas Street from 56 Leonard, windowless skyscraper 33 Thomas Street, A spark will ignite the whole building. from developer’s website. (Image: 56 Leonard LLC). Lower . Alex details the Tyrell takes Elliot to the window to look building’s role as a lightning rod for Cold across the street from their decrepit hacker infrastructure located in the tower, in War paranoia, spell-casting, and TV villainy, loft. The camera pans up a windowless tower, order to tap the communications of non- before considering it in relation to a mirrored concrete: the ill-fated Evil Corp facility. governmental entities such as the UN, the glass cousin across the Hudson.—EDS. This building, as locals and Redditors IMF, and the World Bank, as well those of readily recognised, is Manhattan’s 33 Germany, Japan, and France, and 35 other TAPPING WIRES: MONOPOLY, Thomas Street, the buildingThe Intercept nations. Powerful satellite dishes on 33 PARANOIA AND FABULATION AT would later reveal as a crucial piece of Thomas’s roof were also crucial wiretapping 33 THOMAS STREET surveillance infrastructure of the National infrastructure for an NSA program called Alex Tell Security Agency. But in its possibly less SKIDROWE. These findings have been sinister conjurings the building is also one supplemented by both more mundane THE SECOND SEASON of USA Network’s full of wires; formerly known as the Long and more sinister details from a leaked cyberpunk drama Mr. Robot culminates with Lines Building, a telecommunications tower NSA employee document, which contains a plot by a hacker group called fsociety (as built by AT&T at the peak of its corporate guidance for covert agents visiting the site, in: fuck society) to blow up a data storage monopoly over the telephone networks, including how to rent a car through the FBI, facility of multinational conglomerate and designed to withstand nuclear fallout. how to dress clandestinely (casual clothes, no E Corp (or ‘Evil Corp’). Elliot, the show’s Paranoia, dystopia’s bard par excellence badges), and a reminder to remain courteous protagonist and cybersecurity expert-cum- Thomas Pynchon wrote, is the garlic in life’s to AT&T employees, as ‘this is not a contractual hacker, unaware of the plot fsociety is kitchen—you can never have too much. If relationship. This is a partnership’. concocting, is taken to an obscure location Pynchon is right, 33 Thomas may just be the The breadth of the NSA’s many-tentacled where he is seated in front of a computer most well-seasoned building in . program is now an open screen displaying building floor plans Journalists, working from Edward secret, although nothing new in practice. (‘Evil Corp Facility - Ground Floor.pdf’). Snowden’s trove of leaked documents, Mass surveillance has been woven into the The villainous Tyrell, a disgraced E Corp pinpointed 33 Thomas as the location for an fabric of our society since industrialisation; executive, beams with mouth-breathing glee NSA surveillance headquarters code-named its archetype being, as Michel Foucault as Elliot begins to understand. Execute the TITANPOINTE. We now know that the NSA argued, the panopticon, and from which malware. Override security protocols. Flood used an international ‘gateway switch’, has descended what Gilles Deleuze termed the basement with hydrogen gas, disengage a key piece of AT&T’s communications ‘control society’, in which surveillance

Edited by Adolfo Del Valle & Oskar Johanson | Printed by PageMasters for the Architectural Association | pnyx.aaschool.ac.uk | [email protected] | © PNYX 2019 becomes wide-ranging and dislocated; more reliably, than ever before. That AT&T to remain a key national security partner powerful precisely because it is so diffuse. had a monopoly on long-distance switching, of the government). Saarinen’s Where the Snowden leaks depart, however, it was vital that the infrastructure withstand campus was abandoned, and ultimately is in the specifics. The outlandish names any atomic threat; the project was steeped in sold in 2005 to a developer, who is now in of NSA programs (‘Blarney’, ‘Stormbrew’, Cold War rhetoric, a fusion of militaristic the process of rebranding and redeveloping ‘Oakstar’), the droll corporate language of the and techno-scientific grandiloquence, tinged it as ‘Bell Works’, a ‘Metroburb’—a self- employee handbooks, the precise locations of with a paranoid subconscious. contained suburban metropolis, replete with spying equipment—these granular details Despite its typecasting, 33 Thomas is coworking spaces, third-wave coffee shops, animate our previously nebulous notions of an elegant synthesis of infrastructure and yoga studios and an upscale food hall. surveillance. bunker; a brutalist tower with a ridged Both sites are intimately intertwined in In April of 2017, a group of artists, writers, granite facade, uninterrupted but for a row their demonstration of the mandates of late and occultists donned tinfoil hats and called of square vents midway up the building, and capitalist society, even as they are haunted by out spells to exorcise 33 Thomas (a nod another just below the roof. The semi-public the ghosts of their former shells. In Capitalist to Abbie Hoffman and the Yippie’s 1967 plaza slightly above street level mitigates Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Mark Fisher exorcism and levitation of the Pentagon in the sheer scale of the building; a few trees describes our contemporary condition as one protest of the Vietnam War). David Colon and heavy steel mid-century light fixtures in which ‘ultra-authoritarianism and Capital in an article at the time reported that, keen at street level line the exterior. Warnecke & are by no means incompatible: internment to the malevolent energy emanating from the Associates’ architectural achievement was camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist’. 33 building, and under a banner of Medusa, her designing a building that landed in a territory Thomas is no internment camp. But, as part snakes hissing their tongues at the windowless of aesthetic ambiguity between finesse and of the zealous mass surveillance apparatus fortress, the group flashed mirrors towards the impenetrability. For their clients, this public of the NSA, along with the luxury pseudo- building to ‘confuse and foil this building’s image would be instrumental in quelling city of Bell Works, it fits into this paradigm. operation’. Banging their drums and calling the company’s existential panic about the Both buildings typify the pacification and on witchcraft to save us from ourselves, this potential breakup of their powerful corporate dissolution of political agency produced joyous and enigmatic protest fomented at monopoly, its bunker ideology serving by the alliance of monopoly capital and that moment precisely because the group had to protect AT&T’s telecommunications governmental interest; both concretise the found a metonym for the surveillance state, a infrastructure at any cost, ensuring continued inevitabilities of capital. lightning rod for their frustrations. service (and without which their monopoly Contemporary life in New York is beset In light of recent reporting, the over telephony could not be rationalised). by a unique strain of paranoia, the result characterisation of 33 Thomas in Mr. Robot as To a certain extent this worked. In 1956, of the city’s increasing unaffordability and the headquarters for Evil Corp is almost too the Eisenhower administration agreed that the precarity of life for anyone not ultra- on the nose. Project X, a short film directed AT&T could retain its monopoly on the rich. When it feels as though every building by Laura Poitras and Henrik Moltke of The condition that the company ‘confine its is being swooped upon by speculative Intercept that accompanies their exposé on business solely to telephony—and matters developers and converted to luxury condos, the subject, exploits this coincidence, both in of national security’. to be sold on an already oversaturated luxury its narration by Rami Malek (the actor who Just across the Hudson River, built not real estate market, dominated by foreign plays Mr. Robot’s protagonist Elliot) and in ten years earlier, sits Eero Saarinen’s Bell investors, all in the midst of the biggest its score, which, as a low foreboding drone Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, its sweeping, affordable housing and homelessness crisis of an electronic synth soundscape, recalls pastoral campus and International Style this city has ever witnessed, I find a perverse Mr Robot’s own. The filmmakers play off grandeur flaunting the image of a suburban pleasure in looking up at 33 Thomas’s our desires for a paranoiac narrative. Who arcadia where, flush with corporate funding, windowless face, knowing it won’t succumb doesn’t like stories of covert international scientists could dream big, ushering the to the same fate. It is fundamentally, espionage—and better yet, a true story? The nation into an era of technological and triumphantly, unfit for human livability. occultic conjuring of demons by artists and military superiority. It was here that Diagonally opposite 33 Thomas sits 56 activists acting as exorcists can be seen as a scientists and engineers grappled with the Leonard, a 60-storey glass tower by Herzog continuation of the fabulatisation of a reality development of AT&T’s electronic switching. & de Meuron, made distinctive by its offset too fantastic to be real. At first blush, the spatial and symbolic balconies, each attached to one of 145 Architects John Carl Warnecke & logics of Bell Labs and the Long Lines outlandishly expensive apartments. Their Associates described the building as a ‘20th Building seem oppositional. One suburban, price tags reflect their spectacular views but century fortress, with spears and arrows one urban; one a luxurious workplace for perhaps fail to account for the other urban replaced by protons and neutrons laying people, one an organisational apparatus commodity that, given their neighbour, they quiet siege to an army of machines within’. for machines; one clad in mirrored glass, have over anyone else: privacy in the densest This army of machines was AT&T’s Electronic all internal windows with a reflective of cities. I look up and think: at least your Switching System, first introduced by the exterior, the other a windowless concrete, neighbors aren’t spying on you. research-and-develoment division Bell impenetrable within and without. But they ______Labs in 1965. This system transferred the together stake out twin pillars of the Cold labour of telephone communications from War military-industrial complex. Alex Tell is a writer based in . human-operated switchboards to computer- Antitrust lawsuits led to the eventual She is currently a graduate student in Columbia controlled ones, allowing AT&T to handle breakup of AT&T’s monopoly (although GSAPP’s Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual a much higher volume of telephone calls, the company itself obviously continues Practices in Architecture program.

Edited by Adolfo Del Valle & Oskar Johanson | Printed by PageMasters for the Architectural Association | pnyx.aaschool.ac.uk | [email protected] | © PNYX 2019