Below we examine several ways that The Stack is grounded at the City layer, from the scale of global networks to that of the individual envelope, and back again. We will see that this integration of one into the other looks less like Leon Battista Alberti ’ s organismic city, all parts fitting into natural wholes, than gory multispecies nested parasitism, one organism living inside another, itself perhaps living inside yet another, and shuttling energy in and out, through skins and interfaces. For this figure, the City layer is an urbanism of catalytic digestion more than settled homeostasis; its appetites are computational but no less violent for it. The Stack is also expressed in City versus City remote warfare, as dramatized by the launching of the Stuxnet virus into Iranian nuclear facilities (perhaps physically installed there by hand, perhaps inadvertently downloaded), where the software took hold of specific centrifuges and tricked them into malfunctioning but reporting themselves as fully operational. <sup>12</sup> This sort of weaponized transurban code is not so unlike a parasitoid fungus, Orphiocordyceps unilateralis, for example, which infects the brain of a species of ant and directs its zombie to crawl to the precise height in the jungle canopy suitable by temperature and humidity for the fungus to fully spore and where the ant husk becomes a factory for the production of more fungus. Such is the model infrastructural information warfare of microorganisms, insects, mobile software, and megacities. <sup>13</sup>
At landscape scales, The Stack supports the consolidation of bandwidth infrastructure into continental nodes as well as the design of massively integrated architectural forms and programs, encapsulated into architectural megastructures visible from a now primary satellite perspective: buildings at Stack scale. These megastructures may be there to organize human habitation or object flow (e.g., corporate campuses, airports, warehouses), but in many cases, the design problems are increasingly similar to one another. The end result is not so much a neutralization of placefulness but rather a monumental (or antimonumental) hyperinscription, a total architecture withdrawn from the public city and bound by its own structural borders, gates, walls, and skins, gardens, introverted from its immediate environment so as better to connect to external planetary economies on its own terms. Enclaves inside of enclaves digest one another all the way down. For these megastructures, spatial integration is defined in the paired tongues of experience and logistics, and realized by folding their urban functions under a single roof and programming them (attempting to at least) as a single architectural system, as a self-binding and homogeneous geodetic datum. Some of the most dramatic examples are, not surprisingly, the headquarters of Cloud platforms themselves. But like the Sith from Star Wars, megastructures always come in pairs: their purification of program from immediate urban situation and withdrawal into formal singularity is always necessarily and irreducibly dependent on a doppelganger megastructure (or more than one) somewhere else.
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City Layer