Hot Farms: How Emails Grow Tomatoes

“Hot Farms” explores the formal, material, and cultural synergies between cloud-based data infrastructure and agriculture from the perspective of “industrial symbiosis,” a process that involves utilizing the waste energy from one industry as a resource for another. In this case, how the exhaust heat expelled from data storage facilities into the atmosphere is utilized for high-intensity greenhouse farming and other forms of agricultural production. In other words, identifying spatial configurations based on the premise that your personal data is a resource for food . . . TWITTER FEEDS!

The talk highlighted the cobenefits from two seemingly unconnected systems and the productive and cultural spaces that ensue. For example, projects combine data storage and seaweed farming, data storage and greenhouse farming, data storage and rewilding, as well as data storage and food waste, among others. From a methodological perspective it will highlight the potentials and challenges of applying scientific research to architecture and urban design. In summary, the talk highlights how the combination of data and agriculture might inform new configurations of landscape and architectural space that reshape the countryside and the city, and which offer more meaningful connections between consumers, their digital lifestyle, and resources that critically respond to challenges in contemporary food flows. The context for the research is Ireland, which is a hub for large digital corporations and their attendant infrastructure.

Lyster’s presentation was followed by a conversation with two respondents, Marina Otero Verzier (Head of the Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven) and Víctor Muñoz Sanz (Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Delft University of Technology).

Presenters

Clare Lyster is a Chicago-based architect and professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Architecture. Her work rests at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure, with emphasis on how the material, metabolic, and sociotechnical systems in the city territorialize the built environment and the implications of this for design. Work is delivered across multiple platforms, from books to articles and from exhibitions to speculative design proposals. She is author of Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities (Birkhäuser, 2016), coeditor of Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan (Actar, 2017), and coeditor of States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape (Actar, 2021). She is also a member of ANNEX, an interdisciplinary arts collaboration in Dublin that curated Entanglement, the Irish Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. She received the 2019 SOM Foundation Research Prize for a project titled “Hot Farms: How Emails Grow Tomatoes,” the subject of a forthcoming publication Future Farm Forms (Actar, 2023) that identifies productive adjacencies between data storage and agriculture.

Respondents

Víctor Muñoz Sanz is a Spanish-Mexican architect, currently assistant professor of urban design at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. His current research looks at architecture at the intersection of labor, management, and technology. Previously, Muñoz Sanz was a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude; coordinator of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre and coprincipal researcher of “Automated Landscapes” at Het Nieuwe Instituut; emerging curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and a Druker Traveling Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is the coeditor of Roadside Picnics: Encounters with the Uncanny (dpr-barcelona, 2022) and Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture (nai010, 2020), coauthor of Foundries of the Future (TU Delft Open, 2020), and has published essays in Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux Architecture, Volume, Domus, and in several books. His research on automation with Het Nieuwe Instituut was exhibited at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Muñoz Sanz holds a degree in Architecture and a PhD, cum laude, from ETSA Madrid, and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design, with distinction, from Harvard University.

Marina Otero Verzier is head of the Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven. The program focuses on design practices attuned to ecological and social challenges. In 2022, she received the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. From 2015 to 2022, she was the director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut, where she led initiatives focused on labor, extraction, and mental health from an architectural and postanthropocentric perspective, including “Automated Landscapes,” and “BURN-OUT.” Previously, she was director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in New York City. Otero has been a cocurator at the Shanghai Art Biennial 2021, curator of the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, and chief curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. She has coedited Lithium: States of Exhaustion (Ediciones ARQ and Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2021), the second issue of Dixit “A Matter of Data” (Cosa Mentale, 2021), More-than-Human (Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2020), Architecture of Appropriation: On Squatting as a Spatial Practice (Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2019), Work, Body, Leisure (Het Nieuwe Instituut and Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018), and After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), among others.