Towards the Meteorological: The Architecture of Data Centres and the Cloud

The digital cloud permeates daily life. The $174 billion industry is fuelled by 3.6 billion users and constitutes three per cent of global energy consumption. This thesis examines the cloud metaphor and the data centres it denotes to reveal the cloud’s temporality, spatiality and materiality from an architectural perspective. By creating analogies with cloud variations—meteorological, fictional and artificial clouds—the research seeks to uncover what the metaphor discloses about digital archives. Despite the (digital) cloud’s ample presence in adjacent fields, a theoretical framework for it has yet to be established in architecture. Tapping into the planetary imaginary, I show that digital archives embody the meteorological mode: like meteorological clouds, they are extremely responsive and governed by an archival impulse to continuously update their animated, mobile data.

Part I addresses the geological implications of data centres, the physical backbone of the cloud, as servers are made of materials extracted from the ground: metals, minerals, rare earth elements (Parikka). The beginnings of geology as a science (Hutton, Lyell) defined the planet as an archive. In dialogue with a variety of thinkers (Ruskin, Smithson, Ernst, Leopold, Bjornerud, Cohen, Deleuze and Guattari), I develop the geological mode—a temporal, material and spatial method that embodies the logic of the ground. It guides my analysis of three case studies. The first is the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, New York. This archives sediment cores, extracted from ocean floors, which contain geophysical and environmental histories embodied in fossils. Thinking with Meillassoux, I explore the vast temporal horizons stored in the formerly animated matter. To further gauge the ground’s temporalities, I turn to the large-scale memorial Il Grande Cretto (1984–2015) by artist Alberto Burri. It archives geological matter that used to constitute the built fabric of Gibellina before the latter was destroyed in an earthquake. In line with the planet’s intrinsic movement (Clark), affect theory (Ahmed, Berlant) and art-historical references, I understand Il Grande Cretto as Burri’s attempt to suspend persistent geological activities. The geological mode engenders archives that incessantly update their content. This mode is embodied in Henning Larsen’s Nordea Bank headquarters data centre (2017). Data centres harness the archival capacities of geological matter. Their ingrained secrecy, resilience and redundancy invite architectural comparison to the bunker (Virilio, Hu). The bunker is positioned in tension with vast infrastructure networks from which data centres cannot be isolated (Koolhaas, Easterling).

In Part 2, against the backdrop of the firm but active (geological) ground of data centres, I turn to the cloud and the meteorological mode. Beginning with the philosophical context of the sky and its clouds as media (Durham Peters), I describe meteorological clouds’ aerosols as data points that literally store and transmit information. Like data in the digital cloud, the continuously transforming and shifting aerosols compose ever- new adjacencies and juxtapositions. Referring to early computing (Babbage), I postulate meteorological clouds as analogue computers. For an architectural constellation of weather and computing, I turn to meteorologist Richardson’s speculative Forecast Factory (1922)—a combination of a cloud and a globe, designed to compute and archive the planet’s weather. I then turn to the archiving history that has affected the cloud metaphor. The example of an early databank proposed by the American government in 1966 reveals how the cybernetic archive, in combination with the constant presence of radioactivity during the Cold War, fuelled archive (Derrida) and network fever (Wigley), finally culminating in our digital cloud. The outsourcing of nonconscious cognitive processes (Hayles) to technical beings is an attempt to cool these fevers. I pair the digital cloud’s nonconscious realm of machine learning and Big Data with the notion of a great outdoors (Meillassoux, Bennett). Artificial clouds mediate the inaccessible. Architectural examples during the 1960s (Wright, Ant Farm) actualised the cloud mediator at a time of budding instant global communication and space travel.

The digital cloud thus constitutes an exterior, a physically inaccessible realm that is paradoxically filled with intimate and identity-defining information about its externalised users. The digital cloud is more than a metaphor: it articulates an increasingly pervasive spatiality of the threshold, of bodies without surfaces, of space as media, of our built world extended into the intangible—in short, a great outdoors.