Data Hotels, Carrier Hotels or Teleco Hotels

A New Hybrid Typology for the future of Telecommunication Buildings

by Yorgos Tzirtzilakis

1. The last years the OTE Building in Chania became vacant… With offices empty, the building seemed as "a modern ghost building." What will become in the future? We can imagine, or suppose -and with whom conditions- his transformation in a type of Mediterranean Data Hotel (related to Middle East)?

What is a Data, or Carrier Hotel?: “Within cities, lines concentrate in carrier “hotels,” otherwise known as telco or "telecom hotels". The history of the carrier hotel at the One Wilshire tower in Los Angeles is an example of the current system. One Wilshire is a hotel, a teleco, or data hotel, functioning as communications hub for the Western US and leasing space to over 260 telecom related companies. One Wilshire embodies the invisible physical spatiality supporting the virtual space of telecommunications and networking. As corporations eager to take advantage of high data bandwidth move into or near the tower, over a dozen nearby buildings have been converted to teleco hotels, reviving the real estate market in southwest downtown. But the fiber leading out of One Wilshire remains invisible” (Kazys Varnelis)


One Wilshire Data Center


The Gospel of Judas. Download here


2. Three symbolic buildings of OTE in Greece. OTE (Hellenic Telecommunications Organization) was founded on 23 October 1949.


OTE Tower in the 3th Septemvriou Street


OTE Tower in Thessaloniki


OTE Central Building in Kifissias Avenue, Athens

Free Time Work (No Stop Free Time Work). The Blurred Boundaries Between Work and Free Time (Leisure)

by Yorgos Tzirtzilakis

In late capitalism, the production of life forms and what many are calling biopolitical production, are replacing the work activities and industrial production, resulting in the unprecedented diffusion of working time through the duration of the day and the annulment of the distinction between work and free time (which decisively affects all of our lives). So, side by side with the overproduction of material goods and the supremacy of the weightless immaterial credit sector, there emerge a series of “minor” social, economic and environmental dynamics that mark the end of the Fordian work regime. At their base, these are a series of evolving practices, not always definitive in form, that remain “invisible” in the margin of the conventional social, cultural and political systems of representation.

In the past, the workspaces have been the architectural prototype for the industrial production. Like the Fordist factory, it is built on Taylorist principles of industrial spatial organization. Yet while the city has been transformed throughout the last few decades by the restructuring forces of Post-fordism, what has happened to the workspaces? Anticipating the further decline of those constitutive oppositions the work activities sort has been built upon (city versus nature, work versus free time (leisure), mind versus body) – thus anticipating that workspace will become ever more relevant in our urban life -like as a no stop activity- the research poses the question as how to rethink work activities a problem of the Post-fordist city.

If one had to be more specific, the proliferation should be mentioned of alternative lifestyles, the designing of experiences[1] (rather than objects), the dissemination of ecological and non-governmental or independent organizations, volunteerism, contemporary philanthropy, the ‘new age’, ‘positive externality’, creative classes[2], creative cities, an idealized but also ill-defined participatory culture, the practice of endless discursive prevarications, the bloggers’ culture. It might be that a few years ago we thought some of these practices to possess an alternative, even anti-capitalist character; today, however, they are components of the Post-Fordist diffusion of the ephemeral and assimilated into the current rhetoric and the managerial model of the modern “microphysics” of power.

There are some who will find this assertion displeasing. But, since meta-Fordian capitalism is based on the production of life-forms and ground, territory what we designate by punk-aesthetic, alternative counter-culture, interest in graffiti, artistic mode of production even some versions of ecology, including guerilla gardening, belongs to the “formal” economy’s tactic of reappropriation, and therefore to the agenda of the professionals, the technocrats and the politicians. The famous governance is nothing but a way to ascribe value to these social practices, while certain forms of environmentalism are rising up as contemporary platforms of consensus and management of social conflicts and of the extensive urban transformations which are in progress.


[1] See Joseph Pine II, James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage, Boston Massachusetts, 1999.

[2] Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, New York 2002. and Who's Your City? How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, New York 2008.

Anti-design

Archigram L.A.W.U.N. Project (Locally Available World Unseen Networks) Archigram Archive 1969

A collection of projects that criticize the rational systems of organization and establishes a link between building and furnishing objects. The project becomes a series of tables, chairs and other objects, the domestic and the urban coincide.

Much like the process of Freudian therapy, these projects was to serve as diagnosis and cure, radicalizing the furniture tradition and the rational organisation of the workspace to the extreme.

by Yorgos Tzirtzilakis

Y.Tzirtzilakis interception on ArchiZoom

Yorgos Tzirtzilakis presented the work of ArchiZoom in the 'radical' italian architecture context of 1960-70s. His presentation -an interception, as he called it- touched on the issue of dealing with 'neutral', 'typical' and 'indifferent' architecture. These concepts were discussed earlier in the workshop after the visit to the OTE building in Chania. Tzirtzilakis presentation aimed to provoke a positive reaction to the building and indifferent or banal architecture while insisting on the 'liberating' effects of non-figurative architecture. The last remark brought a refreshing discussion among the participants on the critical context of the work of ArchiZoom and the relation between politics and architecture. 

More videos here.