Catalogue: more specimens

Specimen templates 10–19 of 19

• LV-7 · template launch-vine

  Launch specimen

  A reusable booster on four landing legs, soot up its lower body because it has flown before, grid fins at the top, grown as the spire of a vine and straight through the roof in a flashing collar. A string of small flat satellites trails from one branch; a propellant tank stands at its feet. In its room the building answers with patch plates over the cracked panes and two timber braces. Nobody has proposed a taller roof. It can be seen, blurred, from the ticket window.

  Stands in for

  Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

  Appears in

  S17 · S18

• AH-18 · template airframe-hall

  Airframe hall

  A tower crane grown as a plant: a lattice mast in a steel pot, a jib the width of the hall, and for a leaf a whole swept wing standing on its root in a jig. Under the jib a fuselage barrel in its green protective finish sits on cradles while the next one hangs from the hoist; on the apron a finished narrow-body in plain white stands chocked, with one worker by the line for scale. No livery at all. It stands across the aisle from the roof problem as the public-market reading.

  Stands in for

  The Boeing Company

  Appears in

  Not on the tour.

• FT-15 · template fab-terrace

  Wafer fab terrace

  A company that still made its own processors, drawn making them, ingot to chip on one plant. The stem is a glass tube with a silicon ingot growing inside it and the flower is a finished wafer gridded into dies. Off the stem stand two cleanroom bays, a diffusion furnace with a suited figure for scale and a lithography stepper, a sealed wafer carrier on the track between them. A tray of packaged chips waits on the floor.

  Stands in for

  Intel Corporation

  Appears in

  Not on the tour.

• FP-12 · template footwear-press

  Footwear press

  A sole press for a crown, its upper mould coming down on a warm sole. Wooden shoe lasts hang from the left boughs like fruit, a finished pair is held out on a shelf, and beside the pot stand plain shoe boxes with a pair set on top and a pallet of blank soles waiting to go in. It appears in a comparison rather than a room of its own.

  Stands in for

  NIKE, Inc.

  Appears in

  Not on the tour.

• NC-13 · template network-canopy

  Network canopy

  A server rack for a trunk, its cables rooting into a raised floor, a smaller rack either side, and a canopy of paper: profile cards with small portraits and snapshots of hills and a sun, every one tied to its neighbours by a thread. Kept for its 2012 offering. It borrows nothing from the company’s own marks.

  Stands in for

  Facebook, Inc. (2012 initial public offering)

  Appears in

  Not on the tour.

• CG-9 · template retail-branch

  Consumer-device giant

  Three ordinary product branches and one that is not. Headphones, a speaker and a camera are held out on branches of ordinary size; the fourth has grown thicker than the rest and ends in a bunch of handsets bigger than the other three put together. It sagged, so it stands on an oak crutch post of its own, footed on its own plate on the floor, clear of the pot. A branch that size needs foundations. The drawing does not remark on it.

  Stands in for

  Reserve collection. No company in the register sits for it.

  Appears in

  Not on the tour.

• CF-2 · template chip-fern

  Chip infrastructure fern

  Fine and repetitive where the consumer specimens are chunky. The silhouette is a fern, three arching fronds and a fiddlehead still unrolling, but every leaflet is a bare chip snapped to a square grid, and there is no pot: it grows out of a rack cabinet piped to a frosted chiller on the floor. It reads as the thing everything else is plugged into.

  Stands in for

  Reserve collection. No company in the register sits for it.

  Appears in

  Not on the tour.

• IT-1 · template industrial-trunk

  Foundational industrial giant

  Squat where the modern specimens are tall: a barrel of rolled iron plate in three riveted courses, two brass bands and a riveted dome, too heavy to trust to its roots and so shored up on raking struts in an iron bed of coal. Its stubby limbs carry a flywheel and a slung crate, which is what an older business made and shipped. There is soot on every surface that faces up, and streaked down the lee of the stack.

  Stands in for

  Reserve collection. No company in the register sits for it.

  Appears in

  Not on the tour.

• RB-5 · template research-nursery

  Research bloom

  A potting bench arranged round one small, bright thing. The bloom is six glass flasks of coloured culture set round a lit brass hub; a coolant line coils up the stem from a frosted chiller at one end of the bench, and a brass arm holds two grow lamps over a tray of seedlings at the other, some barely up. Almost everything on the bench keeps the middle warm, lit, fed and cold at once.

  Stands in for

  Reserve collection. No company in the register sits for it.

  Appears in

  Not on the tour.

• PF-0 · template production-frame

  Country production frame

  Not an organism. A country is one year of output, so it gets a frame with a width and a scale bar, and anything stood inside it is read against that width. Never against its area: area flatters the smaller quantity, which is exactly what the frame is here to prevent.

  Stands in for

  United States, Sweden, Switzerland

  Appears in

  S14