Fear Awe Wonder: Metamatter Students. Jamie Bond, Simone Chait, Carol Chen, Zechen Huang, Rui Li, Willis Li, Tianyi Liu, Sophie Sung, Minh Duc Vu, Siqi Yang, Qinling Yao, Fan Zhang and Yibin Zhang.

Studio Leader: Patrick Macasaet

‘…finding the wilds beyond the machine, finding the gaps and cracks that create our other future.’1

METAMATTER is the first edition of the FEAR AWE WONDER series that seek to reimagine our architectural agency to design, speculate and communicate architectural ideas through three founding trajectories: [1] typological and procedural techniques; [2] gaming and the moving image; and [3] narratives and worldbuilding. It is an evolution of the After Series studios (2020-2021) that initiated a deeper inquiry into the potentials of gamification and world-building for architectural speculation in parallel with continuing research on procedural techniques.

Fear Awe Wonder critically threads these territories to explore the edges of our emerging contemporary digital and autonomous infrastructures – positioning these new types and machinic landscapes as a cultural idea juxtaposed with alternative climate and environmental imagination. It views infrastructure as a civic project, not only valued as an engineering and technological endeavour, but worthy of design consideration as indispensable systems of our cities.

This studio iteration will focus on the architecture of data centres as an emerging new form of infrastructure of our digital selves, cities and immortal worlds impacting future socio-political and cultural landscapes. As Facebook rebrands to Meta and global companies enter the metaverse fray; as we see the rise of cryptocurrencies, nfts and tokenomics; as we see our cities and devices become ‘smarter’; as we see the gamification of our personal and professional lives transformed to bits and pixels and we grow accustomed to ‘culture instant’ - the engines of the cloud need to work triple-time. There has been much recent energised discourse in the virtual, digital and the metaverse but the back-of-house infrastructures of the data centres are the physical matter that matter. The studio is not only interested in the fabrication of digital worlds but also the physical and material infrastructures that sustain it and the thresholds in-between. We ask, what is the spatial, environmental, social, political and material impact of our digital worlds and what agency does architecture have in these developments and environments (physical/meta/virtual)? What new or alternative forms of institutions, infrastructures and representations can emerge from the constant negotiation between the physical and the virtual?

Many of our infrastructures that maintain and support our cities are primarily located in the peripheries - the “infrastructures that condition and construct our world have been rendered invisible to it. They are comfortably hidden away, unsung ‘monuments’ to an ‘environmental irresponsibility’ playing out at a terrifying scale.”2 They are central to the production of our urban environment but are largely ignored and forgotten. Big shed data centres thrive in isolated rural environments where land is more abundant required to materialise power, capital and space-hungry ecosystems. We will go the other way. The studio will investigate the future adaptation of abandoned factories and productive architectures of the past embedded within our suburban landscapes as staging grounds for experimentation. How might the architecture of the data centre simultaneously look to our histories, site and place to inform projective forms, space and program for this emerging type? The studio will engage with the abstraction and augmentation of architectural typological behaviours as formal, spatial and compositional strategies to unravel new models of civic-didactic infrastructures.

Beyond the speculative procedural processes, the studio’s design development work will foreground game engine based open-ended worlds as a possible new pictorial and architectural space of production and design to establish a new pipeline of designing to unearth new realities. This approach could potentially, not only generate speculative architectural propositions, but also explore and design speculative fictional worlds that engage with contemporary concerns for the architecture to inhabit with the ambition to further design discourse and allow new thoughts of concerns and opportunities to surface. We will utilise game engines to situate new possibilities, worlds and narratives for and within fictional/non-fictional scenarios intended to enable new architectural and environmental discourse. What type of Imaginary Infrastructures could emerge through a critical interrogation of typological behaviours? What is the potential of game engines and gaming as experimental grounds for other infrastructural and institutional narratives?

This series is not about the proposal of solutions but provocations that require deep imagination and courage to step into the rabbit hole. As design theorist Benjamin Bratton stated, “… so-called ‘industrial architecture’ may be where many of the most interesting technological and intellectual disciplinary problems are now situated, it has little prestige. Theoretically rich coffee-table books of best-in-class automated power plants, warehouses, megafarms etc are required.”3

1. Young, Liam. 2019. Liam Young keynote Dezeen Day. YouTube video, 53.26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4iPKIrD9RE

2. Odell, Jenny. 2013-2014. “Satellite Landscapes.” Jenny Odell webpage, November 22, 2020. https://www.jennyodell.com/satellite-landscapes.html

3. Bratton Benjamin. 2019. “Further Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene.” Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene 89, no. 1: 14-21.

Thank you to all our guest crits and contributors: Vei Tan @mimaworkshop (Superscale/MIMAW), Alan Kim @alan_arch_kim (RMIT PhD/Tectonic Formation Lab), Justin Chong @j.usjus (DCM), Maddie Di Salvo Pardo @maddiepardo (Clare Cousins Architects), Youjia Huang @youu.and_ (RMIT Architecture/Red Design Group), Jan See Oi (RMIT Architecture), Tom Muratore (RMIT Architecture) and Annie Zhang (Hello Metaverse/Roblox) throughout the semester.

EXPLORE VILLAGE GLOBAL.

The concept of living forever online has never been more possible. However, with the inevitability of the Metaverse, NFTs, AR and VR, we need to ask ourselves; has the pendulum swung too far?

The lack of tangible or visible infrastructures for technology allows for an ignorance towards the negative effects of digital progression.

How can we put data on display, literally, turn the traditional data centre inside out? Allow the ever changing and adapting transferal of data to become an immersive and interdisciplinary experience for communities.

This project interrogates the ethical implications of living online, through a proposed 5-point manifesto that explores the ‘data city’:

The city /ˈsɪti/
Data centers are not a thing in isolation but interwoven in the functions of a city.

The cloud /klaʊd/
Gaming and the metaverse are encouraged to be consumed as part of a community, and in the physical realm.

The transfer /transˈfə
Transferals of data through the city are physical, visual, and immersive.

The home /həʊm/
Each person is held accountable for the data they use.

The ark (ARCHAIC) /ɑːk/
Data racks are designed to be environmentally efficient and easily transportable

This project looks optimistically forward toward atopian potentials that challenge the dichotomy between real and virtual.

Much like in the biblical flood of Noah’s Ark, we look toward a new landscape, cleansed, and rebirthed from the malicious, antisocial, and consumerist patterns of online behaviours.

EXPLORE GLOBATA TOWNSHIP.

Globata Township project speculates on a future data centre for Cocoroc Township at the Western Treatment Plant in Victoria. Data centres are infrastructures that are rarely physically visited by people, but they are intensely personal and deeply connected to our daily lives. Globata Township translates our vision for the new digital data township where we envision to blend the historical and cultural qualities with the new immersive data centre. This project explores the concept of an open and immersive data centre with the ideas of non-physical security systems for civics.

The project developed a collection of fragmented buildings that are located adjacent to existing infrastructures with similar functions, to bring back the culture of the township. It creates a unique immersive experience for the public while increasing awareness of data centres that are fulfilling our everyday life. Typological studies and experiments allowed the extraction of key ideas such as the concept of a non-physical surveillance system and the blurring boundaries between data centre and landscape. Globata Township project experiments with new emerging data centre infrastructures and innovative approaches to blend them into our city rather than locating them to the periphery. As our generation is heavily dependent on data, we are responsible for how we use our data. The project believes that there is a need of visualising our cultural legacy (data) in tangible form in our cities where we can experience our digital generation.

EXPLORE PRODUCTICITY.

Producticity is the node connecting Melbourne CBD and Geelong in an elaborate transportation network spanning between the micro-cities of Victoria. It brings the data centre and it’s rigid, lifeless typology from the outskirts of society into our city centres as they become some of our most prominent societal infrastructures.

In doing this though, another challenge faced when integrating data centres into the urban fabric is where to actually locate them. So, at its core, this project looks to dismantle the office type and bring the fragments to the data centre, rather than the other way round, and so we can now look to the potentials of data as an additional form of decentralised currency, like crypto and NFT’s, to be exchanged.

The site is charged by the kinetic energy produced by the cars on our freeway as well as the electric vehicles parked stationary in the charging terminal. It aims to ignite a lively civic presence in a type otherwise devoid of any soul, by inviting numerous privately owned entities in to lease out both its physical and digital space. A space that is highly customisable and free to be reprogrammed and adapted as needed by an individual or as part of a larger body.

Through the architecture, we seek to facilitate a cultural movement from working and basing our lives in the real world, to a hybrid type that is suspended somewhere between the two. Even the heat expelled by the footprint of our digital self is used to fuel the living, using the technology to change our urban spaces.

EXPLORE HEREAFTER.

It was said that the Human body is a machine which winds its own springs, but can it be rusted, or can it be autumn.

Surrealism, concentrated as a representative form of human, a living organ. Heart, lungs, kidney, liver, gut, veins. As containers of DataHall, Medical Research Centre, loading, office, services functioning.

He’s holding his hands, the blood, the skin, did he find his father?

The wrinkles.

Oh, it’s the shadow of himself.

He is finally here, Cocoroc, the forgotten town.

A flat wasteland with lush staggered trees popping out, obscuring part of your view. You can see it, in the fog, it might look strange.

Don’t doubt, don’t hesitate, follow the roads and you’ll find your hidden ways.

HereAfter was deeply embedded in the forest. It was an enormous Datacenter and Medical Research Center for experiments exploring the extension of reality. The nature, the landscape, is it nature? Look closer, look closer. Scattered Solar flower growing from the ground, the water, wabbling, adopting the utility poles connected one place to another.

If you enter the facility and go further, much further to the center, you can even hear the heartbeat from the core. It’s a living thing, evolving, improving, self-maintaining.

They work together as allies, not adversaries, complementing the false, reveals and recreate the truth. Is reality the reality, is reality the truth? Either way, they belong to you.

EXPLORE META OASIS.

Located in the western suburbs of Melbourne, MetaOasis gives new life to the Sunshine Grain Silo, which has been abandoned since 2014. It contains 35 independent modules spreading on the 23,000 sqm narrow and linear site, centred with a solar farm and 2 data halls, situated in the gigantic concrete volume of the existing silos.

Each independent module of MetaOasis nicknamed “Mushroom”, is an energy efficient hybrid of data blocks and vegetable growing slots that people can access from online platform. The mushroom is generally designed to guarantee the performance of data blocks by water cooling, with water collected from rain, and the collected rainwater can be used for irrigation simultaneously. Also, the excessive heat generated by the data blocks is used to radiate to the surrounded vegetable growing slots to increase the yield. The solar farm has 22 mirrors reflecting sunlight to the central receiver, which is 100 metres above ground floor.

Our proposition is to create an oasis that blurred the boundary between the infrastructure of a data centre and future farm. By dealing with real conditions and virtual possibilities of both data centre and farm. The combination is energy-efficient by optimising the usage of excessive heat and rainwater. Also taking advantage of a data centre, the production of vegetables could be automatic. Encouraging people to engage with the site both in person and online.

EXPLORE AUTONOMOUS: INFINITE TIME-SPACE.

The future is coming…………

What will it be? Matter? Meta?

Location: A western suburb of Melbourne

Time: 2050

Unhuman and fully automated data centres are becoming the new type of architecture where drones will replace humans - bringing them into a more efficient rhythm and eliminating the need for manual labour. In an efficient machine environment, humans are no longer the first major player, the human body is no longer the primary scale of the space, but the machines that occupy it now define the architectural parameters that contain them, and form and material architecture are configured to predict the logic of machine perception and comfort.

Experimentation and programming explore how a fully automated centre can become part of human culture and how this cultural shift will change the world. Perhaps fully automated data centres mark the end of human-centred design as we chart an era of hard-drive-centred design, LiDAR-centered design, and automated drone design. But the emergence of new building types does not mean that humanity needs to abandon everything that came before it, which will resonate far into history and even deeper into the future.

EXPLORE THE REFLECTION.

What is Metaverse? Is it Virtual reality? So what is Virtual reality?

If Metaverse VS. Universe and Virtual reality VS. Reality, what’s their relationship with each other?

Welcome to the world of REFLECTION, where these questions will be answered. And in order to comprehend the reflection thoroughly, please first construct the following three fundamental ideas:

1. In the initial stages of building the metaverse, the majority of our work is spent reproducing the real world in virtual reality; in other words, the metaverse is like a shadow of the cosmos.

2. We require data as a bridge in order to replicate reality in virtual reality.

3. The data center serves as a mirror between the universe and the metaverse, allowing us to connect the two realms.

In my design, the world is composed of Components, the Wire bridge, and the landscape; the components are composed of three parts: the roof provides the experience space of the Metaverse, the mirror floor is used to record the experienced data, and the data center shaped like an inverted Tulou is used to analyze and utilize the data; the wire bridge is not only used as a data bridge in the virtual reality; but also connects the physical suspended components with different height and provides multiple entrances to the surrounding community; the landscape on the ground is the combination of typology of the data center formation as a continuation of the design concept REFLECTION, as well as a community park in the real world.

EXPLORE PROJECT: LIDA.

The aim for the project is to create a data center as a future form of library a cross-programming between a data center with a library situated on a heritage site of John Darling and & Son Mills. A merging of a private with a public space, creating a sense of transparent, allowing certain access for the public to a (used to be) secured, highly private space. Bringing back the idea of the ancient Alexandria Library, where data/ information/ knowledges are created and used by the public, by the surrounding community to create new inventions, create new conversations, and build a better world. ‘LIDA’ will be a place allow the public to be able to access data with less censorship, providing space and facility for new inventions and ideas to be present to look for patrons and collaboration.