Annette LeMay Burke

Prime Location examines how vast fulfillment and distribution warehouses are replacing farmland and open space at the edges of California's communities, rising where highways, rail corridors, and last-mile delivery routes converge. What was once prime agricultural land is now prime location of a different kind — ground for the infrastructure of instant consumption. The warehouses' repetitive, copy-and-paste architecture, banal yet monumental, has become a new vernacular of the shift from brick-and-mortar retail to e-commerce. As a lifelong Californian, I've watched development steadily consume the landscape; nothing has arrived as suddenly as these warehouses.

The project pairs two bodies of work. The first is a typological study of warehouse façades, emphasizing their anonymity and standardized design. The second consists of temporal layerings: my recent photographs of newly built warehouses combined with earlier Google Street View images of the same sites — some made only months before, when the land was still pasture, orchard, or open field. Compressing time within a single frame, these composites chart how quickly working landscapes become industrial ones.

Together the images consider the paradox of convenience: altered terrain, displaced memory, and architecture optimized for algorithmic efficiency rather than human presence.

Website http://atelierlemay.com