2024-02-03 21:22:39
From the Middle Ages onwards it was the church. Under the yoke of modernity, the factory went from the factory to the corporate skyscraper, later and subject to the progressive scales of change, digital technologies became an essential prosthesis for an idea about the creation of forms. Virtuality brought computing and where before we had the library of Alexandria and imagined the Tower of Babel, we now have the data center. In between were the disputes of postmodernity, the interchangeability between signs and money, and the little attention paid to the concerns of a counterculture that, suspicious, began to see the depletion of energy reserves.
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Each era has its own architectural typologies defined by the predominant means of production. Each era is capable of explaining itself through its imagery, and each architecture becomes effective in our minds depending on whether we are able to imagine ourselves in it. But how can we imagine an architecture as ethereal and immaterial as ‘the cloud’, especially when it is the product of something as abstract as data?
Contrary to what its vaporous name suggests, ‘the cloud’ is neither weightless nor invisible, it is the result of cooperation between a vast number of satellites, fiber optics, cables laid on the seabed and data centers full of servers that consume huge amounts of water and electricity. Minerals – silicon and heavy metals – are its backbone, but its lifeblood is still energy. It feeds on everything it catches, its body is insatiable: it consumes 20% of all the electricity the world uses, grows faster than sustainable energy sources and drinks more water than the entire world population combined, according to the study by the principal investigator of the Microsoft Research Lab and director of AI Now Kate Crawford, in collaboration with the University of Sydney. That, not to mention that the gigantic infrastructures that support the world’s computational dermis do not stop growing: the construction of data centers has increased by 30% since the pandemic years, according to the same study.
However, its expansion opens up an opportunity and a challenge that cannot be postponed to address, from an architectural point of view, the interaction between these facilities and the environments in which they are located.
The work of the architect Marina Otero Verzier (A Coruña, 1981) is dedicated to this task. She has spent years researching the physical infrastructure of the Internet, not only as a series of architectural objects to observe, but as a vehicle to analyze the urban planning it deploys. , the materiality of its distributed power, the capital it mobilizes, the work it requires, the energy it needs and dissipates, but, above all, the environments it builds and the society it imagines. Consequently, in 2022 she was awarded the prestigious Wheelwright Prize from Harvard University.
For Otero, a doctor of architecture trained at the Madrid School of Architecture (ETSAM), at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and at Columbia University in New York, (where she now also teaches), the work of architects has involved , historically, the drawing of abstract and assertive lines that, too often, have subscribed to the logic of economic efficiency at the expense of ethical and ecological awareness. His vision of architecture, however, is crossed by the responsibility of providing new notions to the challenges that architectural practice faces to dismantle the borders that currently define, enclose and exploit the world to the detriment of common interest and justice. social. Hence her interest in issues related to migration, security, access to housing and climate change. And hence, also, of course, their willingness to face the imperative of rethinking digital infrastructures or, at least, the way in which their excretions can be reused so that other architectures can benefit from their thermal surpluses and thus supply their own energy demands.
In this sense, his work not only points to all those initiatives developed in recent times that, with the intention of lasting, focus on the thermal management of their surpluses to air-condition large housing lots and other urban facilities, nor does it exclusively investigate the projects that reuse this waste heat to supply agricultural and industrial processes on a still modest scale.
“These announcements are very positive, but they must be observed not without some skepticism. It should not be forgotten that, sometimes, to carry out these actions and to move heat from one place to another, extra energy capital must be added. For all this to make sense in terms of energy efficiency, strategically locating data centers near the enclaves that are going to make use of their thermal remnants is essential. The idea is to reduce losses, not to add more costs to the transfer of energy,” adds Otero.
For this architect, it is essential to understand, first, that data centers are reliable proof that we have moved from an urban planning of permanent uses and physical control systems to a more mutable, liquid and digital one. Second, this displacement opens a field of possibilities regarding the planning of these spatialities, while opening a very important debate about the rights and power mechanisms they entail. And, third, that these infrastructures carry with them critical implications for the current climate crisis and require a profound cultural change in terms of design, but also in terms of our way of approaching and living with them.
It is paradoxical to think that these alexandrias Digital are architectural typologies inherited from the telephone exchanges that began to be implemented in urban centers at the end of the sixties and that responded to the communication need of a society that was beginning to become interconnected.
If buildings such as the telephone exchanges in Torrejón de Ardoz or the satellite communications center in Buitrago de Lozoya (both admirable works by the Madrid architect Julio Cano Lasso), had the double mission of being, at the same time, technical enclaves and banners of the company that built them, now the representativeness of data center architecture has been relegated to ignominy. It is not about making its architecture visible as a claim to technological avant-garde, but rather about hiding it and erecting a backyard landscape. We only have to look at the examples: its design prioritizes security and privacy criteria over representativeness, while its construction rarely falls on architects, but is undertaken, mainly, by large consulting firms in collaboration with corporate conglomerates. that promote them.
“Although data centers are fundamental nodes in our social, geopolitical, cultural and financial landscape, their presence, below the threshold of detectability, remains banal and anonymous. The obscurantism that surrounds them reflects very well the asymmetric and abusive relationships between technology corporations and end users. On the one hand, these companies entrench themselves in transparent, permeable and accessible headquarters, while, on the other, the real machinery with which their software operates is located behind the biometric closures of anodyne, impermeable and impenetrable architectures. While little, or very little, is known about these omnipresent spaces, they have already been consolidated as urban or peri-urban typologies in their own right,” says Otero.
Locating data centers within the social fabric is essential to transform their overheating into a valuable resource for the urban developments in which they participate and also for the communities that are affected by their mere presence. The work of architects can and should have this issue on their agenda.
In this sense, Otero gives as an example the company Qarnot, which is leaning toward the progressive decentralization of its facilities in France: instead of betting on the acquisition of large areas of land and the design of large, windowless buildings and far from population centers, they suggest installing servers in the same buildings where people live. To this end, they develop data storage devices that can be installed in everyone’s homes, contributing their calorific balances to their own neighborhood. Under this premise, there is a whole line of research that suggests the design of mixed buildings that take advantage of below-grade spaces, with better hygrothermal conditions (absence of thermal discomfort), for the location of data centers, with the upper floors intended for other types of uses, both private and community, those that benefit from the dissipation resulting from computational processes.
“This model, not exempt from externalities, addresses other forms of data governance. This is positive and something to keep in mind because it distances us from the conception of the data center as a large black box to be opened, but rather places it at the center of our domesticities as a critical element that mediates the creation, storage and the transmission of our digital records through tangible physical networks: the cloud is no longer invisible but palpable. This is essential since there should be a growing individual and collective awareness regarding the ecologies that arise from our lives. onlineabove all, to be able to mitigate its effects and begin to think about more desirable, more sustainable, more equitable and egalitarian computing futures,” he says.
The data center is beginning to take a relevant position in the debates on contemporary architectural production, and, in fits and starts, a much more exhaustive look at them is beginning to be activated. There is a long way to go, many questions unresolved and many questions to ask: Should we think that we are facing our contemporary archives, the most important typology of our century? Should its design represent a task of similar relevance to that of cathedrals in the Gothic era or museums during the Enlightenment? And, if so: What would happen if we conceived it as a true open source public infrastructure to go to learn how data and algorithms work? Would we be facing a place for knowledge and political participation: the public space of the digital age?
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