The House of the Machine is the Territory. Architecture in the Loop
S.M. Reichenbecher (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
A.E. Rout – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
N. Katsikis – Mentor (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
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Abstract
Artificial intelligence is commonly framed as immaterial and placeless, yet it depends upon extensive territorial systems of extraction, labour, and water management. This thesis investigates a corridor along the Kemijoki River in Arctic Finnish Lapland, where hydropower infrastructure, mining operations, transmission networks, tourism economies, and emerging data centers converge into a dense, layered landscape.
Instead of understanding the data center as an isolated spatial object, the research situates it within a broader set of interdependent ecological and infrastructural processes that reorganize territory through the demand for energy and cooling. Water, in its different states, emerges as the central medium through which these transformations are traced. The Arctic climate therefore becomes a strategic resource.
Through territorial mapping, fieldwork, media analysis, and research-by-design, the thesis investigates the externalized systems required to sustain continuous computation and explores new territorial synergies between cooling infrastructures, labour, and control. These processes typically remain concealed within the abstraction of the black box, while their ecological and spatial consequences materialize across peripheral landscapes.
The thesis argues that the “exclusion zone” (LeCavalier 2019, 54; Young 2019, 10) of the data center is itself architectural. By exposing and spatializing the hidden thermodynamic and ecological dependencies of artificial intelligence, the project proposes new forms of coexistence between human, machine, and non-human systems within the “operational landscapes” (Katsikis and Brenner 2020) of the Arctic.