Faculty of Design

Environmental Design

Khalid Hassan

Datum Objects for a Future Rural Settlement: Notes on the Climatic Residue of Data

This thesis seeks to speculate upon the socio-technical future of Lake Ontario’s rural shoreline. Positioning the data center as a configurable typology through which future life will be relied upon, this work aims to project how rural landscapes will embody their architectural consequence.By centering the turbine, and subsequently wind power, as the baseline object for this speculative environment, the proposal finds ways to publicize this typically daunting piece of infrastructure. Beginning with a provocation from Bonnie Honig’s text entitled, “The Politics of Public Things: Neoliberalism and the Routine of Privatization,” this research understands ‘public things’ as an integral component in the make-up of what one would consider a ‘democratic’ city. Thus, the critical question: can the socialization of infrastructure democratize the processes of energy creation and consumption at a time of such environmental precarity?Here, data usage is understood as a direct contributor to the climate crisis, and with the exponential rise in data centers over the last two decades, a substantial one. How can our built environment play a role in our collective awareness surrounding the carbon trail of our data consumption? This work begins to speculate possibilities. Placing the data center as a socially functional, private module through which residential and commercial programs find their bearings, this project proposes a “datum settlement” that may be the key to a public consideration of our digital consumption.