Living in the Cloud
embodying our data-rich lives
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"All of our dreams and fears, histories and futures are
here, just behind an Oregon Thriftway, drenched in the
stench of diner pancakes and simulation syrup”
Data centers are built all over the world, but North America holds 40% of the data center global market share. Additionally, the USA has the most data centers of any country, including eight of the twenty largest hyperscale data centers. North Virginia is home to 50% of the US’s data centers, but houses less than 3% of the population. The hyperscale data center sits on the edge of the suburbs, humming away, hoping only its caretaker pays attention to what goes on inside.
The Cloud’s planetary presence makes it incredibly difficult to comprehend entirely – worsened further by most people’s lack of proximity to it and our understanding of proximity. Its additional contradictions make it even harder to distinguish – a data center close to us does not necessarily hold our data but it necessarily uses our water, electricity, and labor, and at the same time does not necessarily use our minerals, metals, or industries.For this divide to be bridged, there must be an reintroduction of the data center to an observing audience and reconnection of it to anthropological and urban space. Places are important because they reflect that which goes on around them – by relating to things outside of itself, the data center may become impactful and meaningful in daily lives. Rather than become routine, the aesthetic choices of architecture can foreground a reflection of the urban condition that entices the public to interact and ritualize the inhabiting of the data center.
With the knowledge that the average person generates 54.75 TB per year, the population of Los Angeles generates about 209 million TB per year, or 209 exabytes. It takes about 65,000 sq ft to store an exabyte of data, but only about 50% of the data we create is actually kept in cloud storage. With these approximations, roughly 6.8 million sq ft of server space per year is needed to proportionally represent the data generation of Los Angeles. Additionally, with the rise of AI, the usage of server space is expected to increase tenfold.
Starting from a four block radius around One Wilshire, an existing data center, this project grows proportional to its people's needs. Spreading horizontally across the city, it enacts an egalitarian flattening of the urban blocks into servers halls and fiberoptic cables.
The ultimate political goal can only be achieved if the individuals within the urban fabric buy into the ritual and the cultural experience. The data center must mean something to them and satisfy desires to enact personal agency in this space. The realization must be that the data center exists because of them and because of humanity.
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The mazing stairs, which connect, loop, and transverse each other serve as both the circulation and the generative system of opportune places for the appropriation of the data center. Unable to easily go around, people within the data center must move through the activities and spaces inside. Warmth and coolth get trapped between plates, creating different experiences throughout space and time. The cyclical nature of the cooling systems leads to the expulsion of heat and steam, relating to the loads of the data servers inside.
As we become quantified humans in the eyes of data servers, we resort to these data aggregates as the construction of ourselves. Instead, with clarity of mind, the data center is the aggregate of the modern human condition and is an imperfect reflection of the way we live our lives. Connecting to it as we might a family album, we must recognize that the fallout of the data center results
from us choosing to engage it.
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