In a consideration of commercial architecture, Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan nominates the data center as the 21st-century successor to the factory:
It’s hard not to see the parallels… Each type of building is designed for very specific commercial activities, and each has to adhere to strict budgets and schedules. They are both perfectly utilitarian. … As [architect Marco] Magarelli explained to me, these are far from normal buildings: Some data centers use more than 100 times the power of a typical office building. They need to be ultra-secure and ultra-stable against hackers, natural disasters, and all kinds of environmental ills. These are the buildings that hold the world’s data – if they go, so does our Internet.
(Photo: Filters that are part of a cooling system line a room inside the Facebook Inc. Prineville Data Center in Prineville, Oregon, on April 28, 2014. By Meg Roussos/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The Dish 