WORKS
ARCHITECTURE STUDIO
2026 SPRING
proposition for what a data center could be if it stopped pretending to be a
building. Sited at the Dutch Kills waterfront in Long Island City, the project takes
the operational logic of the modern data center and asks whether that logic,
made visible and made temporal, might constitute an urbanism. The result is not a finished design but an open frame: a shelf the city loads and reloads as its needs change.
The contemporary data center is deliberately illegible: sealed, climate-controlled, branded, and blank. Its aesthetic is the aesthetic of concealment. The Chassis proposes the opposite: a structural frame that exposes its operations, accepts its industrial lineage, and makes no effort to resolve the tension between the building it almost is and the infrastructure it actually serves. The collage work draws on the visual language of machinic indifference as the permanent condition rather than a temporary one.
The plan does not have rooms. It has components: server containers, water
reservoirs, pipe chases, housing modules, pallet-sorter platforms — each sized,
labeled, and independently replaceable. GPU counts are calculated per cluster.
Water volumes are specified per reservoir. What it does not specify is what comes next. The program is a starting condition, not a conclusion.
The crane element, or the ‘wall’ anchors the project, shifting to manage container exchange between the building and the logistics network it serves. It is the building’s most legible gesture toward the city: a moving part at civic scale, an index of the operations inside.
The model does not show a finished building. It shows a condition. The Chassis
loaded with one possible version of itself, colored containers slotted into the
frame that will accept whatever comes next. This is the project’s central claim:
that the most relevant architectural contribution to the data center typology is not a better facade or a greener roof, but a structural honesty about impermanence, an urbanism that admits it does not yet know what the city will need, and builds accordingly.