A date with data

Abstract

Data Centres are the core infrastructure of digital networks, housing sensitive and immaterial information streams. Typically, these high security buildings are geographically isolated due to their supposed aesthetic and functional incompatibility with urban environments. This thesis, through the lens of design-led research, posits that this tension can prompt the emergence of a new urban data centre typology. This research examines how the typically generic, forbidding and austere architecture of the data centre might be architecturally reconciled with the city and intern offset problematic energy inefficiencies in current data storage methods. This research began with a comparison of the data centre and traditional urban infrastructure in order assess the validity of key theories on urban infrastructure to the proposition of urban-sited data centres. Contextualising the data centre’s aesthetic and functional characteristics with existing infrastructure also provided the basis to speculate on the architectural considerations of urban data centres including scale, external envelope, and material interfaces. Following this, urban infrastructures were analysed to distil the way in which architectural mechanisms have been utilized to respond appropriately to different urban contexts. A further case study of Apple’s rural data centre assisted in establishing the fundamental program constituents and functional imperatives that would be used in the design component of this research. Five designs explored the proposition of urban-sited data centres using a combination of traditional modes of architectural representation and iterative processes of analogue drawing and digital modelling. Using the design considerations distilled from initial research, literature analysis and case studies, these design tests examined the data centre’s capacity to engage with the inherent characteristics of each respective site in the formation of its architectural vocabulary. The outcome of this exploration was a series of architectural propositions that make legible the potential aesthetic vocabulary of urban data centres. In both the applied component of this design-led research and in its conclusion, the scope at which the data centre can be reconciled with the urban environment is made apparent. It is concluded that the data centre can play a role architecturally in expressing the growing relevance of digital technology in contemporary social culture and that its physical manifestation can express the complicated nature of the immaterial steam of digital information and its physical storage. This research also confirmed that out of the data centre’s stringent security constraints can manifest architectural mechanisms that can facilitate compositions of urban programs.