DATA NON-CENTER The Sublime of Rural Technoscapes
Contents Foreword ........................................... Research and Precedents ................... Abstractions ...................................... Vellum .............................................. Winter Quarter ................................. Tahoe Reno Industrial Center .......... Syntheses .......................................... Spring Quarter ................................. Reflection ........................................
Foreword This thesis begins with an observation on global network technology, namely the internet, and how such apparently invisible forces are reshaping our relationship to both the built and non-built environment. As science and technology continue to develop at a planetary scale, i.e. the internet, GIS, AI etc., a discrepancy grows between the ways in which the individual and collective body identify in scales of space and time. While we cannot tangibly know the light speeds and reach of data circulation and storage, we feel its mystique as an omnipresent global infrastructure, which has impressed upon us a looming sense of the sublime. This thesis attempts to address such sublime experiences through representation of the data center, a human-exclusive typology, in which the technological, geological and animal relationships are all critical elements that breed a new perception of ecology.
Blue Marble, NASA, 1972
Technologized Landscapes
IG @dailyoverview
Early Observation: Current and future technologies are connecting the world through invisible dimensions that reshape our sense of space, time and scale. We are growing towards an identity of immeasurable senses, brought about by technologized landscapes, artificial intelligence, bioscience, robotics and the likes. 09.2019
Sublime: - “of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe”. (Oxford), - “a delightful terror”. -Edmond Burke
Hyper-Scale Architecture “Looking at the countryside today, there is an emergence of a new kind of architecture, the aesthetic of the data center. Huge facilities appearing across such beautiful landscapes, unimaginably massive, inert boxes seemingly lacking ‘architectural’ qualities. These spaces are not intended to be inhabited; they are hardly even meant to be used or experienced by human beings. Nevertheless, or maybe because of that, they are outrageously beautiful and new, almost the definition of the sublime– as something producing an overwhelming sense of awe or other high emotion through being vast, grand.” - Rem Koolhaas, Museum in the Countryside, Aesthetics of the Data Center
Tahoe Reno Industrial Center
SuperNAP
Abstractions
Observations Mega box structures are being constructed in the rural countryside to house thousands of data servers, at once physically remote, tucked deep away from any human speculations, yet intrinsically connected and human, constantly running through a flux of cultural bits of data. Smart phones are getting smarter, virtually connecting us to anywhere in the world, meanwhile the cloud is being physically manifested in some remote data farm in the countryside, consuming mass amounts of energy in some indistinguishable, unfathomably expansive scaled box-machine. These centers hardly consider the human experience in their design, concerned primarily with optimizing efficiency. Yet, these abstract machined boxes of technology, juxtaposed against an otherwise natural landscape, strike a certain kind of beauty, a surreal sort of land which the laymen neither understands nor has had any cultural expectations to.
11.2019
Formal Agenda Setting Initial abstractions for this thesis aimed to explore the formal qualities in which the remote hyper-scale data center typology is currently understood. One immediate observation, and perhaps the most integral to work with in abstraction, was the reality of these buildings’ immense spatial scale.
In this grand scale, there are few architectural cues that give us a true understanding of the buildings size. Modular assembly being one example, which allows us to approximate the building by it’s perceived part-towhole relationship, and that part’s relationship to us. Modulation is especially relevant to technological architecture because of the need to optimize space for industrial machinery. In the data center, the first order of modules is the server, a box-shaped piece of hardware, which in turn determines the box-shaped server racks.
These server rack modules are then arranged along linear aisles for optimal cooling and space usage. This box-determinism process carries out with increasing scale until the building envelope too takes the form of a box. From this observation, it seems reasonable to deduce that the data center takes no architectural influence from it’s contextual environment but rather is built from the inside out, beginning with a remotely produced piece of hardware. Another cue which sheds light on the data center’s true physical nature is the evidence of connection in moments throughout the building and globally. Former Alaskan Senator Ted Steven’s is often ridiculed for his statement “the internet is just a series of tubes.” While this is a gross understatement of the technology behind it, the internet actually does spatially consist of mostly tubes, or fiber optic cables, which span oceans and continents, plugging in at dispersed data center locations across the globe. Often these tubes are dilapidated and unorganized; a messy contrast to the sleek hardware of a server rack. Together, however, they represent the dual nature of any modern technology, which, though we may have figured out how to harness through industrial manufacturing, is truly only possible by the laws of the cosmos which permit such energy interactions to occur.
Rhizome Data and Lateral Nodes If the data center is the sensible component of the internet’s invisible global network, we can liken the data to that of the rhizome, which operates subterra in an unseen network, occasionally popping up into the atmosphere to carry out functions and gain energy resources.
V E L L UM
Contents: 10 lbs of pewter Made in Dog Beach, CA Melted with Coleman 2-burner hot plate The goal of this piece was to articulate an inherent connection between the natural landscape and modern technology. By casting the stool directly in the sands of our local beach, I was able to utilize what natural resources were available and leave virtually no footprint behind. The result was an object born out of the landscape and intrinsically a part of it. Be that as it may, the process and technologies involved in simply obtaining the raw pewter was anything but an act of local ecology. The 10 lbs of ingots were ordered from Amazon.com via prime
shipping, sent from Elyria Ohio, stopping at 3 carrier facilities on the way, including Ontario, Canada. The pewter is now a well-traveled chunk of earth, an agent of a larger global network.
In its finished condition the product is a hybrid substance, native to San Luis Obispo and the World Wide Web. It represents the current socio-geological epoch in which our local ecologies are now inseparable from the pervasive tentacles of digital modern technologies. It also raises a question of production ethics for the future. Will this pewter meet an eventual remelting and give rise to a new life, neither created nor destroyed but transformed? Or will its life diminish in the face of newer products, made from raw materials continuously extracted from the earth. As architects, we are obliged to consider these pervasive global links amongst new constructions, but more importantly, how such substances might continue to evolve as the next technological tide rolls in.
SAND CAST[les]
TAHOE RENO INDUSTRIAL CENTER This thesis takes residence in one of technology’s greatest meccas for back of house industry, the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. Just nine miles east of Reno, NV, a 107,000 acre park sprawls along the foothills of the Virginia Range, encompassing over 30,000 acres of developable industry
At present, the park is intended for mixeduse industrial, office and commercial businesses, and notably zero residential. The vastness of this privately owned, minimally speculated land allows for stream-lined construction in all aspects; pre-graded sites with pre-approved land uses, immense power, water and fiber optic infrastructure, low property taxes and building permits in just 30 days! The park’s lucrative territory has attracted many high-profile inhabitants, including Tesla, Google and Blockchains to name a few. Switch, a leading co-location data center company, has recently completed the world’s most powerful data center facility at 17.4 million square feet, fitted with a “Super Loop” of fiber optic networking to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas. These buildings, tremendous as they are, are primarily concerned with optimizing efficiency, thus being designed by engineers and technicians rather than design architects. This phenomenon of remote human-exclusive typologies and the discipline’s scarce interest in their design is central to the layman’s disparate attitude towards technology. Leaving these zones outside the conversation of the built environment continues to foster a lack of understanding. That’s not to say that these buildings are nonetheless legitimate pieces of architecture. I would argue that their inadvertent neglect to the human experience has created a quite raw and striking environment.
SITE VISIT I visited the site in January of this year and was deeply moved, even disturbed, to feel the immensity of these buildings in the middle of the desert. Ordinarily, we may observe from time to time a few technological constructions and infrastructures, somewhere passing through a rural area on a long drive, and that might take us by surprise or spark curiosity. This felt sort of like that, but at a much higher scale of power. Driving along USA Pkwy 439, the vehicular artery of TRIC, you mostly notice the rolling hills of the Virginia Range, picturesque in the subtle textures they assume as distance and light soften the terrain. The slope of the hill gives way to the most artificially white, glaringly finite edge, which continues for an uncomfortably long moment until the whole building comes into view. It’s not an intuitive reading like with buildings we typically experience, judging its use by context and scale. These buildings are just really large, and hardly differ from one to the next. Never more than two stories, and long as day, they read as spiritless hyphens that sprinkle the land.
To get closer to the Switch Data Center and understand how these buildings connect to the Earth, I climbed one of the hills for water storage tanks. From this vantage point the sounds of the desert take a very machined persona. On one side Switch was blasting coolers that reverberate a loud humming noise through the air and on the other were noisy tractors flattening and compacting the soil for a new warehouse construction. Perhaps the most striking experience during this visit was the many encounters I had observing wild horses. The Virginia Range is home to over 2,000 wild mustangs, protected by the state, comprising one of the countries largest wild mustang herds. The horses remain free to roam the land much as they always have, only now they take context in a landscape riddled with machines, producing loud noises and oncoming traffic. This supposed coexistence of animal and machine in a remote desert setting perturbs false notions of both natural and machined landscapes. Despite this technology’s working for us, it operates in a space that wholly excludes human needs. One can’t help but feel out of place in this juxtaposed, quietly humming landscape.
“the majority of copy and paste mass-scale rural development is treating a ‘no-building’ landscape like the empty plain in which it isn’t: even the flattest land contains flora and fauna which are almost impossible to retrieve.” - Hannah Wood, New Ground 1: Advancing the Countryside In such a newly absurd kind of terrain, the future feels more present than in what any high-tech city could inspire. The experience, while illuminating for sure, brought very little solace to the questions that I arrived with. As I headed back to human civilization, a sense of urgency and anxiousness loomed over my thoughts, that these spaces are not so much the product of our efforts to sustain a global growth model but rather technocratic opportunists rapidly capitalizing on an unspeculated landscape, blind to the finitude of resources they demand. Because of the industries both physical and conceptual remoteness to the majority of the population, this development is going largely unchecked, and it’s breeding a sublime terrain which we lack the vocabulary to describe, much less design for.
SYNTHESIZING ABSTRACTION AND TECHNICALITY Using the abstract experiments of fall quarter and the technical deductions of winter, this thesis synthesizes an argument for the data center not through legitimizing it’s physical architecture but rather by in a story telling sense, using representation as a kind of omniscient narrator which speaks to the data center’s existence at large.
The premise of this story is that anthropocentric thinking needs to be reoriented towards a more holistic, world-systems view, for the sake of our own survival and generally to not fuck up any future for other life on this planet, and that technological, human-exclusive architecture such as the data center offers a pathway to do such. For the moment, presence of such technology, sensed through the built environment, tends to elicit something of the sublime, but there will come a time when technology has grown so prolific that it becomes indistinguishable from the natural landscape, necessitating a new understanding or language for our environment.
While the data-centers of present construction work just fine with their quick erection and efficient use of space, they do little to speak of their inclusion in the transition of a cultural epoch. This dilemma is as much technological as it is humane, and perhaps not as obvious, it’s also deeply geological. The internet may have been a material invention of our own devices, but we cannot take credit for the forces of physics and planetary resources that it requires, i.e. radio frequencies, light-speed photon travel and the hydrocarbons formed over millenia. To continue using the temporary, non-descript box as an architectural language for technological progress is actually harmful, and plays ignorant to the detriment imposed by the effects of said technologies. In the absence of expression in the hyper-scale data-center, designers have the opportunity, or rather, the responsibility, to a build a new frame of reference of the built environment; a chance to empower new generations with a holistic planetary identity that discards the a priori human dominance in favor of a synergistic ecosystem. The following series of graphic images attempt to accomplish this broader frame of reference by representing the data center in various scales of space and time in relation to previously unseen factors.
Eons, Eras, Periods and Epochs
Solar radiation, resource development and land formation condensed across time and space within our limited worldview.
Orienting technological intervention as a characteristic of time, energy, and space The data center of today should anticipate its utility in the future when its technological function no longer serves and all that is left is architecture of mass scale. This thesis proposes an autonomously grown architecture via a method that extracts its form from casting in the earthen landscape, making the two elements synonymous. Whilst still in the internet age, this architecture captures our experience of the sublime in an uncanny expression of earth, technology and landscape, an object which we cannot recognizably categorize. This ambiguity could serve as a tool to normalize world-systems thinking and redefine our relationship to the built environment. It does not, howev-
er, pretend to know what functions it could serve in the post-internet future or if such grand spaces will still be needed. As architecture should strive to reflect the current zeitgeist, this thesis argues for a more geological architecture of permanence to better represent the magnitude of the internet’s demand on the planet, more so than the current barren and expirable box.
Global Submarine and U.S. Long-haul Fiber Optic Network
“To think geologically is to hold in the minds eye not only what is visible at the surface but also the subsurface, what has been and what will be” - Macia Bjornerud
Mapping global energy influences over the TRIC.
The Local Datasphere as a Heat Generating Body To understand the data center as a geological architecture requires us to look deeper than the sensible relationships apparent to human observation. Due to the sensitive nature of these buildings to securely circulate and store data, exorbitant amounts of energy are required to keep constant cooling and backup power sources running. While the energy demand is high, it’s also important to note that these processes involve a lot of work in energy transformation, resulting in a great deal of waste energy in the form of heat. In effect, the data center takes its true form not so much as a rigid material assembly but rather as a nebulous cloud of energies, constantly exchanging heat between internal and external environments.
Finer resolutions of space and time emerge at the scale of the local network infrastructure.
(Experiments)
Resolutions of building footprints as they compound over space-time.
Scales of Architecture in a Space-Time Fabric Understanding global network technology requires us to look at architecture in varying resolutions of space from micro to macro. Architecture, as it is commonly practiced in this moment, has a difficult time explaining these phenomena within the built environment, for it is faced with limitations in both the available tools of representation and in what human experiences are sensibly allowed for. To reconcile this deficit in understanding the ecosystem across larger scales of space and time, which the data center begs of us in order to sustainably grow, we must articulate these concepts for the time being through experimental representation. By doing so, we can begin developing a more adept architectural language.
TIME
S PACE
Resolutions of cellular information compounding over space-time.
(Non-Conclusion)
A Reflection on the Work of This Thesis The purpose of this thesis is not to offer a solution for the data center, i.e. problems of resource consumption and sterile aesthetics, by proposing a more efficient and improved building. Rather, it is meant to probe architecture’s present capacity to deal with global network technology as it drastically alters the built environment with little speculation or intention behind it. Admittedly, this objective was not realized for much of the year. I spent most of three months attempting to boil down my observations and abstractions into a well-defined, technical building, constantly asking myself, how can design make this building more
efficient? Make more sense for both animals, humans and machine? The effort to understand the data center in our own architectural terms resulted in a less interesting version of the strange reality that already existed. What this process did offer, however, is the realization that our lack of better terms is the very reason why the mega-box is so often left out of the socio-geo-political conversation around the built environment. In all of this work, I discovered that to properly address a question sometimes requires no answer at all. This thesis culminated to produce a series of experimental representations of the data center, touching on concepts of scale in both space and time, from micro to macro to cosmic and back. In the end, I feel that whatever building I attempted to propose dissolves in the face of these elements. The thesis becomes more about concepts in the abstract, acknowledging that humans are sitting blindly at the brink of an epoch, teetering on the edge of the anthropocene as we continue to invent, or rather discover, brilliant new technologies that further obscure our understanding of reality.
Ultimately, I argue for this thesis with the terms of a series of questions: 1. What will become of all of these rural buildings when technology advances, rendering these monofunctional spaces obsolete? 2. How do these places consider their global relationships to the technologies they harbor? 3. What sorts of architects are trained to design these buildings, or are they better left to engineers? 4. As the desert populates and densifies with these machine typologies, will human populations follow too? Or can this model of human-exclusive zones sustain? 5. What do these increasingly prevalent typologies mean for the role of the architect as we evolve into an unforeseeable future? 6. What is the damage done for the local flora and fauna, the 2,000 wild horses in the TRIC and the precious sagebush grass that maintains topsoil and prevents erosion, but once disturbed, is very hard to get back?
This thesis does not answer any of these questions. Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” In the case of architecture being a language of the environment, this thesis asserts that we must evolve our spatial vocabulary towards a far more globalized language in order to begin addressing such questions. That way, we may find ourselves in the position to create for a future in ways that can be sustained not just for humans but in synergy for all global actors.