Executive Summary
- TTSP’s Director of Architecture, Anna Rigoli, explores the architecture and ethics of data centre design in this article; data centres are now built at the heart of our civilisation, no longer in the peripheries, so the time has come to challenge the construction of data centres purely on a functional basis and apply the ethical dimension of aesthetics.
- The quality of space carries consequences beyond appearance and can shape human experience in a meaningful and measurable way.
- In complex systems such as data centres, the organisation, legibility and spatial quality of the built environment directly influence how people work, perceive risk, and make decisions.
Since Covid 19 and the further destabilisation to our world by the steep increase in the use of AI, Data Centres have become ubiquitous in the general press as well as in the construction industry conversation.
Data centres matter, because they are the critical infrastructure that is supporting our way of living. They are structurally necessary and have also become a high return investment for both property developers and operators.
As any sector that has seen such a fast and exponential growth, many ethical questions have been raised about the sustainability of data centre design, how these hugely complex buildings impact energy and water consumption, discharge heat and create a large carbon footprint during construction and operational life.
In essence our use of technology, including anything cloud-based as well as AI, have a very high cost in terms of use of our material resources. Many of these facts are now well documented and discussed. Local authorities are trying to balance their internal communities’ aspirations and needs with the huge opportunities to develop AI hub zones, as demand soars across the world and new markets are now contending for their influence in developing and training fast-evolving AI models.
However, something that is less often discussed is that even in highly technical environments like data centres, architecture is the discipline which carries more visibly the responsibility for the impact of construction on human experience.
If data centres allow us to utilise technology seamlessly from any location, our homes or any other remote part of the planet, they are fundamentally also large developments being built at the heart of our civilisation, no longer the peripheries: their serious impact and physical presence in the built environment is becoming hard to ignore.
If architecture has historically considered these buildings simple sheds wrapped around service functions, the time has come to challenge the construction of such significant structures purely on a functional basis. Data centre design has for decades revolved around megawatts and PUE values, data hall size and cooling solutions.
Many other large infrastructures, like bridges, roads and airports, are, however, more fundamentally driven by the human experience and aesthetics.
In architectural theory, this concept has been discussed as the ethical dimension of aesthetics: the idea that design is not neutral, and that the quality of space carries consequences beyond appearance. Aesthetic ethics, in this context, does not refer to visual preference or stylistic expression, but to the responsibility of design to shape human experience in a meaningful and measurable way.
In complex systems such as data centres, where resilience, security and operational clarity are critical, the organisation, legibility and spatial quality of the built environment directly influence how people work, perceive risk, and make decisions. Buildings which are not occupied in a traditional sense by people, are still very likely to interact with human performance, in their operational maintenance and as technology evolves in their upgrades and retrofit. In fact, we could almost claim that aesthetics is not an optional layer applied after technical resolution, but part of the system itself.
Ironically the buildings which contain and support artificial intelligence, require human management.
On a pragmatical side, the delivery and construction of larger and more complex data centres as well refurbishment and redevelopment of existing structures into data centres use, is also creating issues in spatial coordination and statutory compliance when led purely from the engineering two-dimensional perspective. The role of the architect, as a mediator between aesthetics and function becomes in complex structures more relevant than ever.
Challenging the status quo of designing data centre as the largest possible boxes is the first step. Assessing spatial forms in such rigid terms and with limited ambition is unlikely to produce the most balanced and efficient design, flattening our built environment to a series of repetitive schemes, which will be left as our legacy of this ‘new industrial and technological revolution’. AI itself is showing us that optioneering can process solutions much more quickly and on a number of more complex parameters. Human intelligence and creativity can distinguish the optimal proposal out of many different configurations. And the relation between efficiency, cost and constraints is at the basis of all good architectural designs, however narrow efficiency metrics produce spatial impoverishment.
Societies through history have developed architectural languages reflecting technological shifts. This is reflected in the construction technology advancements themselves and the use of more sophisticated building materials, but also crucially in more visual and aesthetic complexity, especially during periods of affluence and progress. Today’s digital infrastructure growth deserves a similar formal ambition. It also must reflect a society that is advancing not being culturally diminished, if it wants to be truly embraced.
If we look at examples from the past both Futurism and late 20th-century Hi-Tech architecture, they offer us an interesting and relevant perspective.
In the ‘Manifesto of Futurist Architecture’, published in 1914 by Italian architect Antonio Sant’Elia, externalised infrastructure including power plants and railway stations becomes civic monuments in a new aesthetic city, which identifies beauty in industrial civilisation. The provocative idea that ‘each generation must build its own city’ reminds us also the responsibility that architecture holds in providing the visual language of every historical era. It feels to me important that our technological advancement is matched by adequate thinking in formalising our new built environment.
Developing from this theme, High-Tech architecture takes this expressionism of structural and services elements to its extreme manifestation, with steel, pipes and ducts boldly exposed on the outside of buildings, often in bright colours. Subtly, the principle of High-Tech architecture is to maximise internal functions in the building, whilst the aesthetic question widens the optics of what we consider beautiful, as an art form.
In concrete terms, architecture cannot remain neutral in how societies imagine and inhabit technological systems. Our opportunity is to shape data centres as buildings that are not simply beautiful but integrated in our historical and natural landscape. Buildings that respect the finitude of our resources but also offer something in return to our communities.
Reducing them to purely technical objects is intellectually and ethically insufficient, and in no other time than now we have had the knowledge, creativity and technical advancement for a more responsible architecture.
