Bioclimatic Studio, Spring 2020

Cooling the Cloud: Climate-Adaptive Design for Data Centers in the Contemporary City

The data center is an emerging building typology, proliferating in the 21st  century to provide cloud computing services to a rapidly growing number of users worldwide. These centers consume large amounts of energy, partially due to the servers’ electricity load, but more significantly, 40 percent of the energy load is spent by the mechanical systems necessary to reject the heat produced by the servers. In order to minimize data centers’ environmental footprint, we must conceive of architectural strategies to mitigate that enormous heat load. What would be a model for the design of the data center? How can we envision an architecture that provides the cloud infrastructure while managing its environmental impact?

Our design studio explored the potential to create a climate-adaptive building model for data centers in each of the different climatic zones in the United States: temperate, cold, marine, hot-humid and hot-dry.  During a studio trip to Seattle we were able to visit existing data centers alongside meetings with design and engineering teams from Microsoft and Google, to learn of the requirements and challenges involved in data center design.

Programmatically, the data center posits a fascinating building type for architects, because the majority of the building’s volume is dedicated to sheltering and providing the thermal needs of machines rather than of human beings. As both inhabit the contemporary city, a synergy between servers and humans must be explored. Studying the potential thermodynamic cycles and heat transfer processes between human and machine spaces for energy efficiency has been part of the design research. Daylighting opportunities and the overall experience of inhabiting the data centers played a role in the design as well. As data centers are becoming more widespread in urban areas all over the planet, the studio projects investigated the emergent building typology for an urban, climate-responsive data center. 

Professor: Dorit Aviv

Studio Assistants: Zherui Wang, Kit Elsworth, Kian Wee Chen

Students: Abinayaa Perezhilan, Congqi Wang, Jiayuan Wang, Jiewei Li, Junjie Lu, Madonna Nisha Miranda, Mrinalini Verma, Navaz Falee Bilimoria, Shiqi Liu, Sung Di, Suryakiran Jathan Prabhakaran, Tianshuo Wang, Vidyashree Unnikrishnan, Xuehan Zhang, Xuezhu Sun, Yaning Yuan, Yuqing Liu, Zequn Zhang, Zhan Shi

University of Pennsylvania, Weitzman School of Design, Master of Science in Design - Environmental Building Design (MSD-EBD) program.