Ever since we humans gave up the nomadic life and
started building homes, architecture had one goal: To make life better
for humans. But now, a new architecture is taking shape in remote,
frozen corners of the world. And it's not designed for humans. It's for
machines. In this case, for the remote machines that keep Facebook
churning.
In northern Sweden, just below the Arctic Circle, a
new form of modular design is being pioneered by architects based more
than 5,000 miles away in the heart of Silicon Valley. They're being led
by architects like Marco Magarelli, the Datacenter Design Engineering
Manager at Facebook, where he's led the company's unusual approach to
data centers for the past five years.
As tech companies compete
to build smarter, faster, and cheaper, they're sparking a renaissance in
modular, prefabricated architecture, and Facebook is leading the pack. I
got the chance to chat with Magarelli to find out what it's like to be
an architect building houses for most the world's online identities.
Your Selfies Are Energy-Hogs
Most of us think of the internet as something intangible, a floating,
invisible, ectoplasmic world. In reality, the internet is tethered to
the physical world by data centers-thousands of them-that handle all of
the bits and bytes delivered to your computer.
Magarelli uses
the term "magic box" to describe these spaces: the masses know they
exist, but they don't quite know how or where. And his job as the
architect is "trying to make that box as elegant and effective as
possible," he explains.
In my mind, Facebook's magic boxes seemed like they should be pretty
straightforward buildings. Slap some servers into a box, throw on some
mechanical systems to cool them, make sure it's secure, and you're good
to go, right?
Not exactly. As 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. So unsurprisingly, they're booming: the market for modular
data centers is
expected to reach $40 billion over the next four years.
Facebook, as the second most-visited site in the world after Google,
needs a lot of them. The company estimates that its servers process
around 2.4 billion pieces of content and 750 terabytes of data
every day. In 2012, Facebook reported that its users took up around 7 petabytes of photo storage from one of its data centers every month.
Image: AP Photo/Facebook, Alan Brandt.
To handle this exponential increase in demand, two years ago Facebook
assigned three engineers to tackle the challenge of "how to scale our
computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical way
possible." As it grew, it became known as the
Open Compute Project,
an initiative to completely overhaul the hardware and network
infrastructure of Facebook's data centers. Most importantly, they would
put all their work online, making it free for any other company to
follow Facebook's lead.
The team at OCP completely redesigned
every detail: From more efficient server racks to backup batteries that
mean the centers don't need an uninterruptible power source. And just as
important as all that network architecture? Actual architecture.
Making Buildings Like Ikea Furniture
Magarelli joined Facebook in 2009, and as part of the Open Computing
Project, he staged a charrette (the architectural equivalent of a
hackathon) to bring industry experts in lean construction-a theory of
construction efficiency borrowed from manufacturing-into the fold at
Facebook.
Out of the event grew
two basic design concepts.
You could call them Ford and Ikea. The first strategy would be like
"assembling a car on a chassis." You build your structural frame, then
attach all of the actual components, from lighting to cables, using an
assembly line in a factory. The whole shebang would then be driven to
the building site on the back of a flatbed truck.
The second scheme-the Ikea concept-was all about flatpack. Rather than
assemble the modules in a factory, the pieces of the finished building
would be tightly packed into a flat box. Just like your bookcase
hardware, the building components were vastly simplified and
universalized to avoid mistakes during assembly. By breaking down the
building into simple, universal bits, the concept would make building
cheaper, faster, and easier-just like Ikea.
Out of these two
ideas grew the Rapid Deployment Data Center, or RDDC: What Facebook
calls the design of its data centers. A series of pre-assembled modules
are shipped to the site and snapped into place at incredible speeds,
taking the best of what Ford and Ikea had pioneered.
Strange Things Done in the Midnight Sun
This year, Facebook will get a chance to test the idea of RDDC. And it
seems only appropriate that a design inspired by Ikea will go up in that
company's home country: Facebook has
announced a new construction project in Lulea, Sweden, next door to its most recent data center.
Lulea, a city of 46,600 people and several well-known black metal
bands, sits far up on the coast of the Baltic, so far it's almost in
Finland. Temperatures in Lulea never get very high: The warmest month,
July, has an average temperature of 61 degrees Fahrenheit. In February, 6
degrees is the norm. Those subarctic temperatures are a major boon for
data center companies, which spend millions of dollars keeping their
hard-working servers cool.
But it's not just the cold that brings Facebook here: It's also
Sweden's energy infrastructure, which is some of most dependable in the
world. It also comes from renewable sources, a major plus for Facebook,
which has bought up multiple wind farms here in the US to power its
stateside data centers. Other companies are getting in on the action
here, too, and some local entrepreneurs have even coined a slick term
for the region:
The Node Pole.
Lulea 2 will be the company's first data center built using Magarelli's
flat-pack RDDC concept. It'll be an experiment of sorts-a way to test
the ideas that OCP and Magarelli's team have been developing since their
charrette. And when it's up and running, the team will take stock and
apply what they learned to the next project.
The Magic Box
Believe it or not, the work Magarelli and the team at Facebook are
doing has a precedent from over a century ago. "I think back to the
Industrial Revolution and how the buildings adapted to nascent
industries," he says. "What does a power plant, or a paper mill, look
like? All of these archetypes that have evolved to meet industrial
needs."
At the turn of the last century, as the Industrial
Revolution gripped Europe and the US, a new type of building emerged:
The factory. It became an archetypical symbol amongst architects looking
for a new approach to building. Factories were cheap, strong, fast to
build, and sometimes even beautiful. Above all, though, they were built
based on function, not form. Some factories even became sensations
amongst designers: Berlin's
AEG Turbine Factory
is still taught to young architects today. Eventually, there was a free
flow of ideas between industrial and avant-garde design. Even today's
prefab homes can trace their conceptual roots back to the industrial
revolution.
It's hard not to see the parallels between factories and data centers.
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.
Yet something about the rules
and requirements of commercial architecture tends to make invention
blossom amongst designers. The data center, just like the factory of the
19th century, is "a whole new type of building," Magarelli adds.
To most of us, the internet cleans up the messiness of the physical
world and translates it into something intangible, something neat,
something with zero real-world footprint. So it's strange to think that
as billions of us sat hunched around our computers focused on an
entirely invisible world, we were also feeding the flames of something
very tangible.
All of our clicks, uploads, and likes were was
forcing Facebook to invent its own archetypical building: A magic box
that few of us will ever see, but nearly all of us use all the time.
All images courtesy of Lulea Data Center on Facebook.
[Image Courtesy of 
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