thousands of Chicago communs pass it every day and if you have a cell phone what's going on inside a mysterious building affects you could a Chicago skyscraper house government spying secrets I'm in the heart of Chicago across the street from the station where suburbanites arrive in on their daily commute little do they know that if a nuclear bomb were to go off at one of their houses some of the only people to survive would be in this building this gigantic windowless concrete structure is filled with generators and enough diesel fuel and other supplies for its
inhabitants to last 2 weeks without ever leaving it had its own generator and water well to keep it running for at least 2 weeks if disaster struck despite it being a Doomsday Preppers Paradise all these commuters they just walk right by without ever even noticing the strange and secretive structure and that's by Design there's in a kind of inherent internal tension in buildings like these because they are so meticulous they are so dedicated is saying you're not going to have any idea what's going on here you're not going to get this is the closest you're
going to get right here and we're I don't know I mean 40 ft away yeah I'm Zach mortiz I'm a Chicago design journalist and critic and I really like learning about how architecture gets sucked into conspiracy theories so what we know now of what happened at 33 Thomas Street and 10 South Canal and others came from the Edward Snowden documents uh that were leaked to the Press about 10 years ago folks like Edward Snowden and the investigative reporting of online news organization The Intercept implicate buildings like this as hubs in a vast network of surveillance
infrastructure specifically the NSA Taps into telephone and internet traffic directly from here the program is codenamed fair viw and it's one of the largest surveillance programs conducted by the US government in total there are eight locations of similar structures located in cities across the United States Atlanta a 429 ft Art Deco structure in the heart of downtown in Dallas a cubik building with narrow windows and huge vents 611 fom Street in San Francisco 1122 3rd Avenue in Seattle 33 Thomas Street in New York is probably the most prominent example both for its design and its
location conspicuously jutting from the New York Street grid its designer called it a 20th century Fortress so 33 Thomas Street uh is has been featured a good number of times uh in movies and TV shows as sort of a you know blind cyclopian power right this kind of iar on the surveillance Hub completely opaque this allseeing uh monolith of kind of power and privilege and money and agonistic intent just looking at these buildings you can tell that something just isn't right they just look too suspicious but how exactly are these buildings used to spy on
us well these buildings were originally built to house telecommunications equipment like switching stations for routing long-distance calls to other nodes on the telephone networks calling them buildings might be a bit of a stretch since they're not fully for people fundamentally there are structures for machines generators wires supplies and exhaust fans many of these examples were built in the 1970s at the height of the Cold War communication was a national priority which meant ensuring uninterrupted operation even during the worst case scenario a nuclear attack critical physical infrastructure needed to be built so that telephone calls could
be made when almost nothing else with standing all for the sake of the greater good of the country the communication network was owned and run by private companies 10 South Canal was built by Illinois Bell for instance the New York telephone company built 33 Thomas there's a real conflict of interest here private corporations would prefer to build inexpensive buildings the minimum to just do the job the government with its own competing interests needs extra investment to ensure a greater standard of construction this requires close cooperation and lucrative incentives nowadays all these buildings are owned by
a single company AT&T who has historically been an eager partner with government agencies The New York Times reported that one document described their relationship as highly collaborative while other allowed the company's extreme willingness to help today helping means AT&T provides access links and cing Partners to send information to a centralized processing facility codenamed pine cone that's located in New Jersey inside the pine cone facility there's a secure space in which there's both NSA controlled and AT&T controlled equipment internet traffic passes through an AT&T distribution box to two NSA systems from there the data is transferred
about 200 Mi Southwest to its final destination NASA headquarters at Fort me in Maryland so that's the network that these buildings are a part of but let's look a little bit more closely at each building specifically 10 South Canal is a 26-story tower designed by the Architecture Firm hollower rout it's a basic concrete frame building with a caveat of textured concrete panels filling the spaces where Windows would normally be you do kind of see this window pattern uh just kind of with within the masonry uh cut out to kind of form the shape and proportion
of windows but they're obviously not Windows kind of strikes me as like a fake mustache disguise for a building that's has been implicated in spying activities the top seven floors do have Windows and they're used for offices the very top is filled with equipment for moving air in the building machines don't need views of the outside world and would be harmed by direct sunlight anyway which has the added problem of warming the interior so that's why buildings like this don't have Windows but from outside you can see soaring engaged columns and floor plates every few
feet so here we have uh basic structural columns lining the perimeter of the building but behind here and here and all along the perimeter you'll see these darker volumes and those are chambers for telephone cables that rise up out of the earth uh and that was the purpose of this building initially and I've noticed something really strange about these columns they're curiously close together the columns are set in a grid that helps organize the structure along Madison Street there's a column every 20 ft or 6 m in the north south Direction they vary in distance
the second row is 32 ft away from the first while the second is 25 ft again this is really tight for instance the building across the street has columns every 45 ft or 14 M this building has about twice as much structure as a typical building the shorter distance between the columns means the beams and the floors don't have to span very far they don't deflect with the weight this building can hold some extremely heavy stuff inside all this computer equipment uh is very very heavy in fact it's so heavy that you know you could
fit you know 45 uh 50 stories in here but there's quite a bit less than that there are fewer stories on this building than you really could given its its uh height in in feet also the building's core which carries things like wires pipes ducks and elevators up through the floors sits all the way to one side to the South this keeps the majority of the tower free and open as flexible as possible today it's known the facility contains six large V16 yow yellow caterpillar generators that can provide backup electricity in the event of a
power failure according to the Chicago Sun Times AT&T also stores 200,000 gallons of diesel fuel enough to run the generator for 40 days 33 Thomas in New York has reportedly similar equipment inside and while it's still a giant blank monolith it looks a little bit different doesn't just blend in with the towers on all the other sides of It 33 Thomas in New York was completed in 1974 and was designed by the architectural firm John Carl wariki and Associates it has pretty much the same specs it's 29 actual floors but it's about twice as tall
as a normal building with that many floors its structural grid is also very small at around 20 ft or 6 M apart an architectural historian claims that the building's structural capacity is 400 lb per square ft this is like three times more than a normal Tower structure means that each floor could be filled with water over over 2 m high on every single floor and the building would be absolutely fine the same historian writes the building May well be the densest inhabitable object in New York City unlike 10 South Canal this building has a steel
structure and a layered facade made of granite facing on the exterior concrete blocks filled with cables and terracotta tile on the inside during the 1990s an artist was actually allowed inside Stanley Greenberg was able to capture these snapshots across various floors some photos show racks of equipment and really strange looking backup batteries despite the similarities between the two buildings 33 Thomas looks very different and it sit lonely within the New York Street grid the outside panels bot outward between each column so the overall effect is that the building looks as though it's made of a
bundle of smaller tubes some tubes stop short at the 10th floor but at the top of each tube is a vent just like the vents that Crown 10 South Canal John Carl wari had some very doctrinaire ideas about how how he wanted to organize this building and one of them was that no vertical line could be interrupted for a reason that wasn't functional so the only only way he could justify breaking any vertical line that your eye might Trace in thir the automist stre was in this case uh the um the air vent hoods right
so you see vertical lines break there and then start again overall the building is a Relentless grid of structure topped by microwave antennas and mechanical equipment the building is absolutely massive and can hold almost anything published drawings like this leave it up to us to fill in the empty structure with our imagination in the movie winter kills we're given a glimpse of the imagined interior which is repurposed as an information storage Silo contracts contracts contracts agreements kept agreements broken papers papers papers signatures in the movie 33 Thomas Street a protagonist played by Jeff Bridges Nick
Keegan is told by the staff that this building operates even while we're asleep um so it's kind of hinted that computers are actually controlling the show and throughout its history 30th atomas Street has been conceived of as a building inhabited by machines that's more or less how John Cari its architect described it yeah this kind of this trajectory illustrated by the movie winter kills other conspiracy theory media of uh spy apparatus and Security State operations kind of moving further and further away from human hands and human control it seems that we're at a strange Crossroads
these monoliths of surveillance are right here for us to walk by on our daily commutes no one is disguising the fact that they exist but they certainly seem like they're disguising whatever is inside of them yeah it kind it comes like this pure abstract visual icon more than anything you could ever have like a relationship with in one sense they're products of a past that we've slowly marched away from I mean look at Jeff Bridge's then versus now unlike the 1970s the mechanics of surveillance today aren't so easy to imagine spying just isn't tied to
physical space and infrastructure or located in conspicuously in the middle of things anymore but buildings like 10 South Canal and 33 Thomas are built like fortresses and they do more than just provide easy connections to phone lines they're like beacons for debate about privacy and power I mean it's the amazing thing is that like the kind of creepy conspiratorial thoughts people had about buildings like this turned out to be in a lot of ways largely true maybe their conspicuousness prompts us to internalize the cost of the convenience that we associate with the invisible networks that
we appreciate today this is the architecture of the Unseen and when we head home from a day's work remember that the surveillance State never goes to rest wow there's so many [Music] cameras here's a secret that I'm not trying to hide I'm saving up because I want to buy a house eventually and it's just time to pull the trigger this one-bedroom apartment it's just too small for us so I've been trying really hard to get on top of my expenses and this is something that I really usually just try to avoid but today's sponsor rocket
money has been helping me through rocket money is an all-in-one Finance platform that helps save more money and spend less this personal finance app allows you to manage your subscriptions to things lower your bills build a custom budget for yourself and grow your savings all in one place I'm using rocket money to set a budget and then monitor my spending so I can get into that house even sooner they send me notifications when I start getting out of hand and help to visualize our spending it's great they also help by automating savings by setting an
amount and frequency and then rocket money automatically deposit savings into a smart savings account and you can withdraw it anytime and they monitor my credit with me they send alerts when something has impacted my credit score and they give information on how to improve to be honest I've avoid looking this closely at my finances because it just seemed too overwhelming but seriously rocket money has made it easy and simple and it's not intimidating at all so for whatever reason you're looking to say save money and spend less join the 5 million members like me using
rocket money today and I've got the hookup so go to Rocket money.com Stewart Hicks or click on the link in the description to get started for free you can also unlock even more features with premium that's rocket money.com Stewart Hicks to get started for free
