The design of mines, ports, factories, warehouses, data centres and other infrastructural buildings will be increasingly influenced by their automated nature. Entrepreneurs dream of dark factories, in which one can switch the lights off without stopping the fully automated manufacturing process.

Taking a speculative design position, I propose to envision such a new topology in its most radical form: what does a building look like that has been designed from the ground up with non-humans as users in mind? On a phenomenological level, we might not primarily experience such an architecture in its built and spatial qualities, but rather through the sensor network it inheres and the data stream it produces. And even in buildings with domestic purposes, the system of sensors might just see us as one variable out of many.

Making use of film and gaming, I aim to make these machine-centred topologies more accessible to both, architects and urban designers as well as the general public.