Has anyone read the article "Out in the Sort" by John McPhee from last week's New Yorker? My fascination with industrial dreamscapes is throroughly rekindled:

"...he walked with us a considerable distance as if among the hedges of a maze and eventually came to a mezzanine edge where you could see far down and far up through a cavernous vista of the core of the hub. This was the Grand Canyon of UPS. On each of ten or fifteen levels, packages were moving in four compass directions at the rate of one mile in two and a half minutes on a representative sampling of the seventeen thousand high-speed conveyor belts. Pucks were pushing packages to the left, to the right, including lobsters that raced into cylindrical spaces and whirled in semicircles as if they were on an invertigo ride with an "aggressive thrill factor," in the language of amusement parks. In no other place could you absorb in one gaze the vast and laminated space where, in the language of UPS, "automated sortation takes place."

I want to tour this place. Security is probably air tight.

Elsewhere in the article the author compares the UPS sorting hub to a microchip, with conveyor belts carrying packages analagous to copper wires transmitting packets of information. This sort of physical realization of digital space fascinates me. Who, or what, is doing this kind of architecture elsewhere?

I can think of Piranesi, and the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam. Grain silos in the midwest evoke images of complex industrial spaces. What else?