The Prepared is now Scope of Work

Plastic does what steel cannot: take on any shape and then disappear from sight when you’re done with it.

Stretch wrap illustrates one of the fundamental stories of the twentieth century. On the one hand, cities and industries are constructed on an epic and hyper-visible scale from steel, wood, glass, and feats of engineering. On the other hand, within the interior spaces of the warehouse, the factory, and the distribution center, plastic expands and s... See more

If the container is what allows things to move from land to sea to land, and the pallet is what allows products to be moved from warehouses to containers to trucks to distribution centers, then stretch wrap is what allows diverse products to be bundled together and made anew as palletized cargo.

The act of consolidating products into cargo for transit, and deconsolidating that cargo back into goods, is often too eclectic to be fully automated. During these critical points of transition, stretch wrap plays a vital role in helping workers turn products into cargo. With stretch wrap, like things can be combined into a single concise unit, and... See more

In his book The Container Principle, author Alexander Klose writes that “it is, above all, this image of a frictionless, well-ordered organization through standardized containers that makes containers so attractive as a structural metaphor. It evokes the image of a neutral medium, a pure movement of units of information, production, and consumption... See more

The relative invisibility of stretch wrap outside the warehouse or distribution center is echoed in the critical literature on the movement of cargo.

To look at a container ship is to see the world as a set of modular units. The ship itself: a gigantic rectangle. Steel containers form an improbable stack of colorful bricks atop the deck, held together with twist-locks and lashing rods. Inside the shipping containers square wooden pallets subdivide the space, a nesting layer of modularity that bu... See more