S P A T I A L I Z I N G   T H E   N E T W O R K
The Hidden lnfrastructure of the Digital Age

Master Thesis Project
Architecture and Critical Spatial Practice
Städelschule Architecture Class
July 2013

Taryn Simon: Transatlantic Sub-Marine Cables Reaching Land VSNL International, 2007, from the series „An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar” 2003-2007 MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main

“These VSNL sub-marine telecommunications cables extend 8,037.4 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. Capable of transmitting over 60 million simultaneous voice conversations, these underwater fiber-optic cables stretch from Saunton Sands in the United Kingdom to the coast of New Jersey. The cables run below ground and emerge directly into the VSNL International headquarters, where signals are amplified and split into distinctive wavelengths enabling transatlantic phone calls and internet transmissions. Underwater fiber-optic cables are laid along the ocean’s floor by specially designed ships. Cables are buried as they approach shore and armored to protect against undersea landslides, marine life (sharks, in particular) and fishing equipment. Fishermen are advised of cable locations as hooking one can interfere with international communication services as well as sink a boat. VSNL operates one of 14 sub-marine cable systems connected to the continental United States. Exchanges originating in the U.S. are combined and enhanced before broadcast and transmission across the Atlantic. As of 2005, sub-marine cables link all the world’s continents except Antarctica.”

"It’s really vital to remember that the Internet is physical. The Internet can be touched, it is material and it exists - because so much of the rhetoric surrounding current concepts of ‘cyberspace’ suggests that it’s somehow just this sort of magic, etherial realm that exists ‘out there’ almost on its own." ¹

This paper will reflect on how hidden infrastructure spatializes in and outside of the cities through data centers and their spatial requirements. If cities are considered as networks, what is the hidden network that facilitates the city and can trade and geography be considered as a accelerants for development of data center facilities?

One must always remember that the Internet is physical.² It lives in the dispersed heterogenic infrastructure found in and out of the cities. How are these spaces created and what kind of spatiality do they produce? In Frankfurt, Internet exchange points developed connected to the world of trade and geopolitical location. If all networks are considered as trade as in trade of notions, information and data, could it be that the infrastructure that supports it is developed based on the very same principles?

How does this hidden infrastructure spatialize? Why is it that we perceive it as something virtual, when the reality of it is physical? What are the boundaries of the physical and virtual space it houses? To draw a map of the world based on the Internet and its infrastructure would be a completely different map that the map of the world that we know. The paper will reflect on the difference between homogenous zones of Internet's infrastructure and compare these spaces to the heterogenous zones found in cities. The spatialization of the Network of Networks produces various social, economical and physical instances. These instances produce a different urban enviroment and in a sense destroy the urban life but they enable the virtual existance. The networks produce space through nodes and links, and so does the physicality of the Internet.

The network of all networks and its infrastructure  

Infrastructure was first mentioned in the late 1920's. The plain definition of it by "Merriam Webster" dictionary refers to it as:  
"the underlying foundation or basic framework (as of a system or organization)" ³
To set the first use of the word in context, the best example would be the 'Black Tuesday', one of the key events that occured by the end of the 1920's as an result of the Economic boom that ended on that day, the day that the stock market crashes, leading to the great depression.

The society we live in is completely immersed in the 'network of all networks' - the Internet. Daily 1,3 million Android phones are activated around the globe.⁴ Just to compare, around 300,000 children are born each day. Information flow is moving rapidly, the World  and the World Wide Web we inhabit has just started to grow.

An Internet Exchange Point is a physical infrastructure through which Internet Service Providers exchange Internet traffic between their networks. A closer look into networks and the Internet as a 'network of networks' demonstrates that Internet exchange points were developed, historically, so that different networks, carriers and Internet service providers can peer with one another for free. The process of peering happens when two networks exchange data between each other's customers for free and for mutual benefit. Internet Exchange Points reduce costs, enable higher bandwidth and provide the customers connected with less latency. Spatially, IXP’s are spread throughout the world and there is a certain tendency to build more of the data centers facilities to support this process. These spaces operate based on two processes: latency and peering.

Latency in communications is a measure of time delay in the system, determined by the medium used. In a two way communication, latency can be seen as a limit of maximum amount of data that can be transmitted at a single moment.

Peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the customers of each network. In todays society internet exchange points operate based on peering, a mutual agreement between companies to exchange data without the fee. In a certain sense, this process can be compared to barter, a form of exchange between people before the currency was initiated, closely connected to space - using specific spots to exchange their goods and services.

As Bruce Mau⁵ explains one of the biggest changes of the 20th century is the fact that money turned ‘digital’:
“Built or grown by users, or in response to users, the new
infrastructure consists of agreements, alliances, standcards, and systems. It includes :
1. Mastercard, Visa, credit systems : In this vast e-commerce network, connection is more important than physcial real estate. ...”
Still, to facilitate the digital trade in any form, from alghoritmic trading on the stock markets to transfering data from the credit card to the bank, one always uses the network as infrastructure.

Accelerants of spatial development  
Development of data centers of all kinds and scales can be linked to two accelerants. One is the general accelerant of today: trade and the other one, not to be forgotten is the hidden geography of physical network that sends our data from one computer to another through multiple paths across the world. These can also be observed in completely differentiate spatial repercussions.

Trade: Most internet hubs are situated where dense algorithmic trading is taking place. Stock exchanges and trading floors are usually found amongst the dense urban fabric of the city. Therefore, most of the data centers and Internet exchange points are retrofitted, due to the lack of space to build 'the new'. The density of inhabitants then drastically changes, since data centers depending on size operate with a lot less workers than a classical office spaces found in city center. The example from "Blue Monday"⁶, One Wilshire, also talks about the death of a American downtown in relation to congestion and how with data centers retrofitted into old office building this will never happen again.⁷ This area than becomes emptied of any program and even dense traffice which was once the main issue of their fail.

This produces heterogenous zones where data centers are retrofitted into old buildings embodied in the urban fabric of the city centers, physicaly close to trading floors and stock exchanges.

Geography: In "Tubes"⁸,  Andrew Blum talks of "TeleGeography maps"⁹ and how they depict the infrastructure that we use every day without being aware of it. These maps show undersea cables and their upgrade throughout the years and newly built landing stations close to the coast. They are the 'anti-monuments of digital age'¹⁰ that are purposly built in hidden and carefully chosen places.  Usually, they are the 'product' of the tendency to reduce latency, where the physical lenght of the cable becomes the primary measure of speed.

Low-latency is a crucial aspect in capital markets, where the speed of reaction of a company towards respective markets needs to be faster than the one being utilized by its competitors' reaction in order to increase profit.¹¹ General Internet connections are not dependent on physcial location anymore, as the global communications networks have improved and the costs of having access to the Internet have decreased substantially. However, in the trading business, the physical distance has become even more important.
"Time is still money in the world of high finance. But dollars are now measured in milliseconds."¹²

Case studies :  Frankfurt, Los Angeles and New York

Frankfurt, Germany
Frankfurt is located at the heart of Germany, almost at the geographic center of Europe. It has a long tradition of trade, from the 9th century onwards and has always been connected to trade since its geographic location was at the crossing of historic trade routes as well as located between two major rivers which were used as infrastructure for traffic.

Frankfurt is also different from most European cities. Destroyed in the Second World War, it was almost entirely rebuilt, with the Downtown as one of its key landmarks. High rises in the center can be regarded as objects who's physical size is produced by capital. Frankfurt is also home to the headquarters of the European Central Bank, with its new highrise being built on the other side of town on the premises of the old wholesales market, in close proximity to the riverfront and Osthafen, an old cargo harbour.



But Frankfurt is also the home of De-cix, Internet Exchange Point with highest data tranfer per second in the world.¹³ Two territories and sites in Frankfurt have the most dense accumulation of data centers, one in the West of the city and the other one towards the East. However, smaller data centers can also be found all around town. Spatially, these locations are choosen so that they are close to neighbourghoods in which exchange and trade take place. The area in the West is close to the Bankenviertel and the newer one, near Osthafen, is close to the new premises of the European Central Bank (ECB), which will open in 2014 and will employ around 2'500 workers. Most data centers in the city center are retrofitted while the ones found on the outskirts are purposebuilt in the industrial areas with a less amount of inhabitants.

Los Angeles, USA
The example set by Robert Summel and Kazys Varnelis in the book 'Blue Monday' in the chapter titled 'Ether' is "One Wilshire", a carrier hotel in the middle of downtown Los Angeles.¹⁴ Built in the 1960's and designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merill, "One Wilshire" looks just like another office building. One of the key elements of the facade are windows designed to maximize light and views for the occupants. However, today's function of the building has no use of light and views. The building is 30 stories high and today houses mostly internet servers and works as a key peering connection point. The proximity to the coast and cable landing stations enables a huge portion of American and European Internet traffic to run through "One Wilshire".



Summel and Varnelis perceive "One Wilshire" as a fountain of data, especially in the context of neighbouring buildings which were retrofitted to house telecom hotels, providing immediate proximity to the 'fountain'. The argument that the Internet and new technologies will in some sense undo cities as we know, can be argued with the "One Wilshire" example :

"Ironically, if one of the reasons for the downfall of the American downtown is the slowdown in transportation and wear on infrastructue created by congestion, the emptiness of the streets in Los Angeles's telecom distirict ensures that this will never again be a problem for this neighbourhood."¹⁵

The properties around "One Wilshire" became valuable again, but remain unhabited. They mostly house the infrastructure of the Network, without showing what is happening behind the form of the structure. Physical form becomes redundant, it is only there to give home to what we perceive as virtual. Internet exchange points are more feasible to participants connected, they strive to access the 'single point', so they can connect to other networks, internet service providers and carriers without charge. One of the key arguments in this sense is that laying optic fibre cables and ensuring their 'right of way' is expensive and 'requires a significat negotiations'.¹⁶ That is the main reason why companies try to be as close as possible to the transmission source.

"One Wilshire" is also a key example of how carrier hotels, telecom hotels, data hotels, carrier neutral colocation facilities, exchanges and switching stations can generally be found in the downtown, in dense parts of the cities or city's financial district close to stock markets and exchanges. In Los Angeles, this is concentrated in one area or even, to be more precise, in one single location.

New York City, USA
In New York, the city famous for its downtown spread out at the tip of the Manhattan peninsula, data centers and internet facilities are dispersed within and around Manhattan. Nevertheless, one of them stands out: 60 Hudson Street.

Historically, in 1920's, the Western Union Telegraph Company in search for land for their new headquarter in lower Manhattan, had very strict spatial requirements: proximity to the New York Stock Exchange, the commodities exchanges, and also to the existing operations center, with cable links spread out to the backcountry. In the following decade, messenger boys were spinning revolving doors all day, to more efficiently distribute messages to the trading firms of the Downtown New York.

60 Hudson Street is still an attractor, as most of the undersea transatlantic cables land there and therefore bring news from distant markets first. In todays financial services, especially the ones dealing with high speed algorithmic trading miliseconds are the means of success. One can say that the proximity the Western Union Telegraph Company  was looking for in the 1920's is still what is needed for markets to operate with low latency today. Most of the companies dealing with low latency trading today have clustered around 60 Hudson Street.

60 Hudson street is situated in the TriBeCa neighborhood of lower Manhattan, between Hudson, Thomas and Worth Streets and West Broadway. It was designed in the late 1930's by Ralph Walker as the headquarters of the Western Union Company. The design shows influences of German Expessionism and contains detailing known as Art Deco. The gradient of the facade is facilitated by 19 different colors of brick, from darker shades at the bottom to lighter ones at the top.

Up until 1973, the building housed offices, an auditorium, a cafeteria, a gymnasium, shops and equipment rooms and also classrooms for the messengers to further their education. 60 Hudson street then contained more than 21 million meters of cable. At the time of the teleghraph, the Western Union Company was one of the leading centers of worldwide communications. In the 1970's, the building has been turned into a carrier hotel where over 100 telecommunication companies exchange internet traffic. It has once again become a prime site for worldwide communication networks.

The 'meet-me-room' on the 9th floor is powered by 10,000 Amp Dc power plant and has around 1 400 square meters. In this dark, not particulary attractive space, filled with different colored wires, multiple local, national and global fiber optic cables interconnect. 2012 brings algorithmic trading to focus. The equipment was installed in the building close to 60 Hudson Street in order to conduct trades with low latency, so the trades are quicker than in Wall Street situated only a mile away. Today, 60 Hudson Street is one of the most important Internet hubs in the world, situated in one of the most vibrant cities in the world, at the heart of New York.¹⁷

Data center facilities are mostly designed without the facade showing what is actually happening inside, even though they are becoming the key infrasturcture that keeps us connected, with all the good and bad they produce. Socially, they are nodes in the Network that makes us easilly access information and communicate, but spatially they produce a lot of space and use more energy than most other typologies of infrastructure. The parallel between the surface that we access Internet through, which is getting thinner and smaller, produces a spatial repercussion in building more and more data centers in order to contain the very data, which is constantly being generated.

As Andrew Blum comments on contemporary society, we arguably live in two parallel spaces. One is the physcial, in which we can literally walk around objects of architecture found all around us and the other is virtual, the space of data accessed through our screens - a black reflective surface that connects us to the World Wide Web. To facilitate the virtual, however architecture is needed.

Data centers and their architecture could be described as form of non-architecture. They used to be deliberatly stealth, hidden and tucked into strange and often lifeless areas. They are essential for the Internet to work, but still, hiding their function among other infrastructures. In an interview Blum emphasizes on how data centers developed in the urban fabric:

"The Internet is perhaps the greatest example ever of a human-made “emergent” system. There is no master plan. But the urban planning implications are difficult to consider. The Internet operates physically at multiple scales, which often collapse into each other: the machine, the building, the city, the region, and the globe. But it is also an incredibly complex thing in logical and algorithm terms. That makes it difficult to draw an analogy with urban planning. Cities are certainly multivalent—physical, economic, social—but in different ways."¹⁸

Keller Easterling talks of infrastructure as the binding medium or current that mediates objects of consequence, shape and law, but also "the point of contact and access". She argues that "the physical objects in spatial arrangements and infrastructure, static as they may seem to be, possess agency".¹⁹ In regard to the disposition of the fiber-optic network that draws the new map of the world, she talks of it as "'a barometer of the monopoly potentials and a substrate of urban morphology." ²⁰

The speculative turn - projective models and their becoming
The future development of cities and infrastructure is uncertain, both in a sense of time and space. Cities and their networks encapsulate all kinds of protocols of urban planing and emergent morphologies.

Bruno Latour, a French sociologist and anthropologist, is one of the key figures in the actor-network theory and often talks of it on a spatial level, taking examples from architecture and art. Actor-network theory can be descibed as an approch to research and social theory, that treats objects and their spaces as part of social networks. In his keynote speech for the "International seminar on network theory: network multidimensionality in the digital age" in 2010 in Los Angeles, Latour talked about emerging networks:
"... the expansion of digitality has enormously increased the material dimension of networks: the more digital, the less virtual and the more material a given activity becomes. Nowadays, everyone knows that there is no GPS without three satellites; collective games without fast connections; drones in Pakistan without headquarters in Tampa, Florida; bank panic without Reuters screens; and so on." ²¹

In further explanation of his fascinantion, Latour takes Google data centers as an example, stating that this physicallity is probably "the greatest and yet the least celebrated feat of your collective work". ²² Data servers and the infrastructure needed to 'feed' them, has now become fully rendered and thus, fully visible. It  is hidden in the fact that megabytes of data in the network can become describable.

The future outlook can be observed through various scenarious.
Object-oriented and/or singular approach // The current one, or it can be said how most data centers appear to be designed today, is almost stuck in Modernism. It can be described as 'object-oriented', designed- to-perfection architecture, designed in regard to program and purpose of a building. This produces data centers without a face, box-like objects, firmly grounded and simplified to the maximum.

In an urban context, 'data cities' will come to life, huge data scapes of architectural objects to facilitate our connection to the Internet. This areas will then be housing a singular programe. Architects will only be or only are designing a dedicated space and its infrastructure such as power supply, restricited access, etc., without a need to design a facade or anything that can communicate with the surroundings. The architect will be designing an empty, facadeless space to house the data servers. The question arises of whether the architect is needed? Is it just a transformation of technical requirements into space?

In Modernism, total design of the city led to emptied program-less landscapes, even though they were designed to facilitate the needs of the society. Proably the same will happen to 21st century datascapes - they will have no inhabitants, except several workers to facilitate data center needs and security issues. What if one day they become a dead residue of information, as certain Modernist cities became dead leftovers of the their times?

Modular approach // One of the current approaches in the data center design is a modular data center system, a portable method of deploying data center capacity. It is an alternative to the traditional data center, as the modular ones can be placed anywhere with ease when more data capacity is needed. Usually, they are designed as a single module, a shipping container filled with servers, with all the technical requirements such as multiple power and cooling options already aplied.

The other type of modular data centers consists of prefabricated components that can be quickly and easily assembled on site and then added, intergrated or retrofitted where more capacity is needed.

Both of these modular systems are a form of converged infrastructure, an infrastructure designed to provide both technical and business efficiencies, with acknowledgements of industry researchers and observers. The design emphasised on energy efficiency and cost reduction, as well as time needed to facilitate the need for bigger and faster distribuition of data.²³

One can predict that data centers will become a completly modular structures, produced in factories as single units. Where does the architect come in to the process? To assist how the units will be designed to use less space? To assist how the units will be attached to one another? Or to merely serve the data center companies as where to place the containers? We might end up with new harbour-like structues amidst our cities.

Heterogenous space // “The Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture”, a book edited by Michael Hensel, Achim Menges and Christopher Height, focuses on heterogenous space, a space “ordered through differential relationships between diverse systems leading to a multiplicity of atmospheres”. The emphasis is on differentiation, on various typologies of spaces mixed together, rather then the “static conception of Modernist space”. This complex space can be found in the metropolis, where multiple layers of infrastructures and social interactions are overlapping to produce heterogenity.²⁴

The history of computers went from large computer rooms as big as todays data centers to smart phones and flat screens in just 50 years. The scale changed significally throughout the years, since the amount of data one needed to store on the machine directly moved to the ‘Cloud’ - a digital network of multiple server computers that are working as a single computer.

Could it be that in the future, data centers will be the size of cooling devices and every neighbourhood or even every single customer will have its own? These small instances can then be distributed all around cities at different densities and produce more fertile grounds for cohabitation of programmes within urban fabric.

Today, more then 2 billion people across the globe use Internet regularly. One becomes so embodied into this virtual network and can easily turn their perception of the physical space into the one ‘inside’ the screen. People that play computer games sometimes completly forget about the world outside the screen and use only virtual 3D space of the game.

But to facilitate this 'need' to check email, Facebook and Twitter, and with Google glass²⁵ coming soon into our lives, a complete new infrastructure is needed. There is a huge discrepancy in scale within these new infrastructure spaces. They range from 'small portable modules to massive warehouses full of servers'.²⁶

Energy consumption of the data centers world wide in 2009 was bigger then the amout of enegry the whole country of Sweden²⁷ consumes with its 450,295 square kilometres of territory and the population of 9.5 million. The number of data centers in the world reached over 500,000 with 26,4 million square meters of space.

As Easterling writes :

"The most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written in the protocols or softwares of infrastructural space. A non-modern question- the artifacts of which have always been with us, the boundaries of which include but exceed all of the above experiments, and the answer to which we already know-is how space, without digital or media enhancement, is itself information."²⁸

So what will happen if data centers start to appear, in spaces or places outside political boundaries, like just out of the territorial waters on retrofitted oil platforms or purpose built ones? Or technology improves so much that the wires would no longer be needed and they start to spatialize up in the air?

Historically, data centers developed from 'black rooms', hidden in the bigger scheme of the building, usually without windows or even hidden in the floor plan from the employees that were using that exact space for data transmission needed for the company to run. Later, data centers started to get out of the company's premises for various reasons, such as security and less capital spent to maintain the servers.

In 1964, ARPAnet ("Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA) within the U.S. Department of Defense, for use by its projects at universities and research laboratories in the US"),²⁹ was launched, which is today considered as the beginning of the Internet. It was the first time two computer communicated a message to each other, one in University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and the other at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), also in California, on October 29, 1969.

In the 1980's first personal computers came to use. The Nineties are nicknamed the 'dot.com bubble', with servers and data centers popping around the Globe, mostly without a pre-set planning, which can be closely related to how networks emerge.

A blue print for speculative application
Data centers can be observed as place holders that encapsulate the space needed for data flow to smoothly run. As much as our mind is embedded in the network, so are the data servers enclosed in the outer skin of the buildings. The facade of the data center facilities is no longer there to protect human body from various hazards, it is there to protect the equipment with various layers of security.

The server is at the moment the most precious object, it stores all our emails, attachments and Internet knowledge in multiple physical locations, that we are mostly not aware of. Our data constantly flows though the network, taking various paths, selecting its route throughout the fiber optic network, crossing the globe and back in just a few miliseconds.  One is usually unaware of the physical network that is laid next to the railways, under the sea and through different preexisting paths of our cities.³⁰

To trace the physcial route an email takes from one person's smart phone to the other, one would end up with a completely different map of the world, as the hidden infrastructure would spatialize through kilometers of nodes and links all around the planet.

Humans store different information on the network on daily bases, unconsious of the servers surfacing around the world, storing that very data. Physical space emerges from that same information humans produce in the data centers around the world. Even though the predictions are that by 2016, the number of data centers around the planet will double up, what would happen if the scale of spaces needed for servers starts to decrease?

The huge amount of data center space constantly emerging worldwide will become redundant. This is probably a far out future, but what will happen to these areas? How can architecture become an enabler in that case? If data centers and Internet exchange points are nodes and fiber optic cables links in the network, operated by processes of peering and low latency, than maybe that same processes could be used to create new architecture in and out of data center facilities, or maybe between the facade and actual server rooms?

Process of peering sets an example of exchange without a third party and latency deals with time delay in the system. One can imagine peering being used as an architectural tool. Spaces with different intensities of exchange could be produced, just how algorithms calculate various dynamics on the stock market. The time delay or latency could be used as a process to convert spaces, from purpose built architectures to retrofitted embodiements of network with a differentiated time span of transformation, starting now and staying in the process constantly.

The space between the server room and the facade can in that case become relevant, housing programes of different kinds, adding values to data centers themselves, using architecture as an enabler to produce tresholds and capacitating the occupation of these spaces through various time-based programatic models.nMore social activity could be implemented though these processes and the surrounding areas can become spaces of exchange based on same principles the Internet taught us.