ADS8: Data Matter: Digital Networks, Data Centres & Posthuman Institutions

The studio looks at the architecture of data centres as the fundamental component of today’s political, cultural, socio-economic landscapes. Data centres are the testing ground for alternative models of post-human institutions. A new form of architecture for data and machines almost liberated from human needs, shaped by technological rationale. What started under the title ADS8 ‘Domestic Institutions’ as a search for future modes of inhabitation and action, became an attempt to formulate what a 21st-century institution of humans, other organisms and machines could become. From the new spatial, material conditions that data centres bring together, to the network infrastructures that enable them, to the residual cohabitation of humans and non-humans, these apparently anonymous architectures are mobilised here as emerging urban prototypes.

Each student focuses on a case study located in different settings around the world, with the aim of discussing nuanced approaches able to transcend Western perspectives and epistemologies and engage with different geopolitical contexts.

The aim is to investigate possible architectural agency in designing for data and imagine the spaces and aesthetics of human and non-human cohabitation. In doing so we pose the question; How does an architecture for machines foster forms of organization that respond to contemporary challenges?

Kamil Hilmi Dalkir, Marina Otero Verzier and Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli