Archinect - News

Amazon's latest warehouse battle has San Francisco lawmakers pushing for a moratorium on similar developments

2022-02-16T13:47:00-05:00

The second most valuable company in the world, Amazon has been gobbling up space throughout the southeast corner of the city, taking advantage of zoning meant to preserve blue-collar jobs in a market in which housing and office space have typically generated higher revenues.

Amazon bought a 510,000-square-foot former sanitation motor pool parcel in the Showplace Square section of the city for $200 million in December of 2020. It has since proposed an expansion of the site’s footprint into an over 725,000-square-foot distribution hub for 400 workers that neighboring tenants, including the diffuse California College of the Arts, say will create a “pedestrian nightmare” of around 2,900 vehicle trips a day.

Now, as a result of the company’s proposal, San Francisco Supervisor Shamann Walton is seeking legislation that would place an 18-month moratorium on any new parcel delivery services operating in the city. It has already picked up backing from the local Teamsters and UFCW unions. The legislative effort, which the paper sees as another flashpoint in the “war between organized labor and Amazon,” is also backed by more environmentally-minded Prothero Hill and Dogpatch inhabitants, who say the company “has the neighborhoods surrounded” with similar developme...

Amazon warehouses are wreaking havoc in California’s Inland Empire

2021-11-22T19:18:00-05:00

In California’s Inland Empire, dozens of mega-warehouses for Amazon, UPS and other companies are choking the cities with traffic and air pollution. Some argue that the jobs warehouses provide aren’t worth the cost, while others say it’s online shopping that’s the real problem.

Despite the boiler-plate promise of adding jobs to the community, warehouse-laden tracts have been dumping an increasing amount of pollutants into the atmosphere in the form of increased truck and air cargo traffic and propelled in part by a sharp rise in online shopping. Amazon opened its first fulfillment center in San Bernadino in 2012. Today, the company operates more than 30 in the area alone.

Southern California's Inland Empire is one of the most polluted regions in America. One study from the University of California, Riverside revealed an 11% increase in Covid-19 deaths related to the number of particulates in the air. Around 85% of the population that lives within half a mile from a warehouse identify as people of color.

“We’re dealing with smoggy summers that are getting worse and worse,” one Riverside resident told The Guardian in April. “We’re sick of getting alerts that say avoid being outside because of dirty air. This is not normal.”

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Amazon is buying up dead malls–adaptive reuse, or just eating its prey?

2021-04-12T14:30:00-04:00

Amazon continues to makes headlines with its labor issues, workers' rights, and headquarters expansion. However, that hasn't stopped the multi-billion-dollar company from growing, for better or for worse. A recent news report from NBC News shared Amazon's moves towards purchasing empty shopping malls into new fulfillment centers. According to Leticia Miranda, "Malls that buckled due to e-commerce or suffered during the pandemic are being given new life by the very entity that precipitated their decline — Amazon."

Macy’s, 2018. Image © Jesse Rieser

From 2016 thru 2019, Amazon's abandoned mall transformations have resulted in 25 converted shopping malls to fulfillment centers. As malls and big box stores continue to experience the ongoing "retail apocalypse," mall owners needed to pivot and adapt. In July 2020, Archinect briefly dove into mall typology and the "the post-mall future of American commercial architecture." COVID-19 may have been the final nail in the coffin for most strugg...

Amazon to add 1,000 new warehouses throughout U.S.

2020-10-01T13:02:00-04:00

Amazon.com Inc. plans to open 1,000 small delivery hubs in cities and suburbs all over the U.S., according to people familiar with the plans. The facilities, which will eventually number about 1,500, will bring products closer to customers, making shopping online about as fast as a quick run to the store. It will also help the world’s largest e-commerce company take on a resurgent Walmart Inc.

Marc Wulfrat, president of the logistics consulting firm MWPVL International Inc estimates Amazon will deliver 67% of its own packages this year and soon increase to 85%, Bloomberg reports. "In just a few years, Amazon has built its own UPS," Wulfrat continued.

The shopping mall typology is being transformed

2020-07-29T13:51:00-04:00

The slow and steady death of the shopping mall has been sped up since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now several months into the public health and economic crisis the pandemic has set off, mall owners and operators are developing specific visions for the post-mall future of American commercial architecture.

A recent report from the National Retail Federation highlights that the steady erosion of anchor tenants, foot traffic, and consumer interest in malls has been supercharged by the economic shutdown put into effect to stem the spread of the virus. Malls, of course, depend on foot traffic and crowds to thrive, and so have been fundamentally challenged by social distancing and shut down measures.

As a result, the NRF report explains, mall operators are pivoting away from shopping and toward a variety of adaptive reuse approaches that include converting old department stores into co-working spaces, adding hybrid fulfillment center uses offering "digital concierges, mobile a...

Amazon to re-program human workforce

2019-07-11T16:42:00-04:00

Amazon has increasingly turned to robots and automation technology to fetch products from the shelves of its warehouses to ship to customers. Now the company says it needs to help its workers adapt to the rapid change. The e-commerce giant said on Thursday that it planned to spend $700 million to retrain a third of its workers in the United States, an acknowledgment that advances in technology are remaking the role of workers in nearly every industry.

Amazon is planning to spend $700 million over the next five years retraining 100,000 human workers to help smooth a transition toward greater automation in its operations.

“When automation comes in, it changes the nature of work but there are still pieces of work that will be done by people,” Ardine Williams, Amazon’s vice president of people operations, told The New York Times. She added, “You have the opportunity to up-skill that population so they can, for example, work with the robots.”

The retraining effort, according to The New York Times, will include software engineering classes, part of the company's plan to fill a growing need for data mapping specialists, data scientists, security engineers, and logistics coordinators.

The city as fulfillment center: architects envision New York after Amazon

2018-11-28T14:19:00-05:00

One of ARO’s two concepts shows a huge white building emblazoned with the Amazon logo. [...] It’s a never-ending fulfillment center that the architects dub “Continuous Fulfillment.” According to ARO principals Adam Yarinsky and Stephen Cassell, the idea is an homage to a 1969 concept from the Italian radical architecture firm Superstudio called “The Continuous Monument.” The idea posits that technology will render the built environment uniform, turning buildings into white monoliths.

The billion-dollar cat is out of the bag, and Amazon will soon be ascending on Long Island City, New York and Crystal City/Arlington, Virginia to split its anticipated, tax-incentivized HQ2.

As both regions prepare for the new neighbor to move in, Fast Company asked AIA New York State firm of the year, Architecture Research Office (ARO), to envision an Amazonian New York. The firm provided two (rather dystopian) tongue-in-cheek concepts.

How Amazon's patents shape our city of the future

2018-06-08T15:00:00-04:00

Taken as whimsical follies by the design press and broader culture, Amazon's architectural and logistical patents are altogether more sinister, signalling new, automated urban ambitions. [...] While some of these patents could be marked as routine publicity stunts, lurking beneath Amazon’s bravado is an obsession with organisation and productivity: oriented towards abstract users, measured in data, and governed by algorithms.

In his piece for Failed Architecture, designer and writer Matthew Stewart investigates the implications of the overwhelming flood of architectural and logistical patents filed by Big Tech, and Amazon in particular, on our cities and expectations of the world of the future.

"We’ve been treated to an Archigram-esque world of walking cities, inflatable mega-structures and roaming blimps," Stewart writes. "This world has included proposals for multi-level drone fulfillment centers; mobile robotic warehouses; augmented reality furniture; inflatable data centers; underwater and flying warehouse facilities; infinitely expandable data centers; on-demand clothing manufacturing, automated shopping with image recognition systems and the ever-present spectre of drone delivery."

Amazon's new and enormous fulfillment center to be built where America's biggest mall once stood

2017-08-31T13:48:00-04:00

Amazon says the new fulfillment center will create some 2,000 jobs “with benefits and opportunities to engage with Amazon Robotics in a highly technological workplace. The company will spend $177 million to build the new fulfillment center, and job listings will start appearing six to 10 weeks before the facility opens.

Amazon says workers at their new 855,000 square feet warehouse in North Randall, Ohio, “will pick, pack and ship smaller customer items such as electronics, toys and books.” In other words, the new employees will be filling Amazon-branded boxes with the exact same sorts of goods that were once sold at the Randall Park Mall, once the biggest mall in the US, which, ironically, was closed in 2009 due to retail sales moving online.

Amazon's patent for "Aquatic Storage Facilities" could turn lakes into underwater warehouses

2017-07-13T15:53:00-04:00

American e-commerce giant Amazon has filed a patent with the US patents office for a system for storing and retrieving goods in an underwater facility. When an item is ordered for delivery, a sonic signal is transmitted from a buoy to the warehouse, which activates an air canister that inflates a balloon, allowing the chosen product to float to the surface where it would be dispatched to the customer.

Just last month, Amazon made headlines when it filed a patent for a drone tower design, essentially a multi-level fulfillment center for unmanned aerial vehicles in densely populated areas.

Now a recent Amazon patent for "Aquatic Storage Facilities" has surfaced, allowing us a glimpse into the engineers' quest to overcome limitations in storage capabilities, tackle inefficient use of space in vast fulfillment centers, and eliminate the extremely long distances staff members or robots have to cover when fulfilling orders.

United States Patent Office

"Because today's online marketplaces offer a wide variety of items to customers [...]," the patent description explains, "fulfillment centers now include increasingly large and complex facilities having expansive capabilities and high-technology accommodations for items, and feature storage areas as large as one million square feet or more. Therefore, in order to prepare and ship an order that includes a large number or different types o...

Amazon submits patent for a drone tower

2017-06-23T15:11:00-04:00

Spotted by The Mercury News, it’s designed for “densely populated” areas. The tower allows drones to fly in and out, acting like a giant beehive, with robotic arms that help snatch them out of the sky. Inside, the core features layers of spokes around one central hub. The spokes are specialized for various purposes, like repairing the drones, or loading them with goods.

Amazon has been experimenting with the use of delivery drones for some time now though this approach to shipping has yet to take off for the e-commerce giant. As they continue testing this prospective delivery method, it is clear the retailer takes the particular vision quite seriously. On Thursday, the company filed a patent with the US Patent and Trademark Office for a drone tower that would essentially be a multi-level fulfillment center for unmanned aerial vehicles.

United States Patent Office