It is a somewhat commonly accepted fact that architecture – is a “rational” art. This is one of our strongest differences with other arts, which do not – normally – make claims to rationality. We, architects, have a lot of strategies for coming up with forms for a building and justifying them – rationally. However, exactly because there are so many “rationalistic” ways of form-making – and we are so used to using them – we are sometimes paralyzed when we are confronted with the necessity of coming up with a pure - sculptural – form.

If one trusts his/her instincts and inner impulses and just comes up with something, he/she risks producing something tasteless or ugly (from others’ point of view, at least) – without any means of rational justification. It is incredibly easy to miss if you are shooting for a pure form, as although it can bring personal aesthetic satisfaction, it might be deemed useless by the broader society – with plenty of examples in art, Vincent van Gogh being probably the classical one. No one wants to find themselves in this position, therefore, we start inventing form-making techniques, trying to escape the necessity of dealing with pure sculptural/artistic forms.

In rare cases, someone might come up with a form that is generated by pure inner aesthetic drive, but still resonates with the majority of the population. This is very rare – and that is why there are only that many real artists. Most of us are not like that – or at least don’t dare/trust to think of ourselves that highly – but cannot allow ourselves to fail controlling forms. So we start inventing, justifying and post-rationalizing, running from the pure aesthetic, out-of-the-blue form.

Does this make any sense?

This is exactly the “school” I am going  through right now – trying to come up with a form on a purely aesthetic basis, with no function or particular reason for it to be this or that. I never realized how hard it would be…

Thanks and good luck, Aly!

Posters were prepared for the IDR drive, in cooperation with Mary Dassira, a fellow member of IDR and a student at Virginia Tech SOVA.

=)

Underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, DUMBO. A pretty surreal experience...

Yeah, these sleepless nights make your mind go in all sorts of directions and all sorts of things seem funny… J

Click on the image to watch the movie on Hulu.com

Food for criticism, thought, inspiration…

The more I think about it the more I realize that it is purely because no one has ever considered it…

Data centers are dull, cold, noisy spaces. They are infrastructure (Or are they? Is a car an infrastructure, or is it an object defining a “self”, a tool, a religion?) – why would you ever expose them?

First of all, “dull and noisy” is an issue of design and can be dealt with in design terms.

More importantly, though, it is a question of why do we hide what we cherish? Data runs the world (Kitchin, Dodge), but why do we hide it? More specifically, if the “Net” is largely a public space in its nature, and anyone has access to it – to parts, at least – why does it have to reside in bunkers?

The most intriguing part for me personally, though – architecturally – data centers are chunks of pure “matter”. If a data center is a Black Box (Milgram) – impermeable volume filled with “stuff” we do not see – why not exploit the spatial possibilities offered by it?

What is it about Black Boxes anyway?…

Kaaba. Image: Promo-Halal.com

(The previous question was rhetorical; no irony in relation  to the above picture implied)

Today’s urban data center architecture (I am not talking about any non-urban data centers: a building in the middle of a corn field can look however; a building in the middle of a city might want to relate) is an architecture of leftovers and “re-purposement”. One gets a feeling that, just like the train stations of the XIX century or first skyscrapers, urban data centers “don’t know what to look like”: they try to accommodate a revolutionary new technology by squeezing it into known forms, not knowing how to deal with it.

Find a Data Center in this picture! Image: http://www.andrewblum.net/

Previously, data centers have not been designed to be public spaces. Concerns were many. Privacy. Security. But with the growth of both the pure bulk of information and resulting increase in demand for space, as well as the growth in the complexity of network structure, data centers are paradoxically becoming very secure. We used to hide them because we were scared someone would find that one critical node and blow it up, but by now there are so many nodes that even if someone tried, they would have a hard time doing it: most of them still remain securely hidden and backed-up. Rhizome at its  best.

Rhizomatic systems. Image: http://thinkingenterprise.blogspot.com

The only security concern is the security of the data itself, but that has nothing to do with the physical positioning of servers. Data is everywhere, fragmented and dispersed. Try find it.

In fact, it is pretty interesting that even the highest echelons of the data-producing and managing circles – mammoths like Facebook, Amazon and others are becoming more and more open about where and how their stuff is stored. Some make them into design marvels already now. Some even brag about it out right.

I guess the attitude is changing…

//to be continued