Raindrop Prelude

Abstract

Modernism drew hard lines to distinguish between human, nature, and machine, three key players forming where we live and what we use as tools. Being the sole agents, humans have utilized nature and machine as entities forming a rigid trichotomy. But with the advance of technology, including ChatGPT, the boundaries have evolved and will further evolve to be dissolved in many fields. While modernism still dominates in architecture with strict division, this thesis questions how architecture may work and what activity or logic could be introduced if a porous framework applies to it. It imagines the potential of a building for machines, a data center, to experiment with such a framework and explores the potential of the data center to also be used for humans, incorporating the conceptual logic of nature for its spatial organization. In this way, a highly comprehensive ecology of human, nature, and machine can be achieved, intertwining three different systems to coincide in the same mechanism. The data center is a warehouse for machines arranged in an extremely efficient grid system. Together with layers of hallways for security and white background noise, it creates a transcendental atmosphere suitable for meditation; a gradual process to reach emotional and mental stability. Once a dispersed mind goes through the process and reaches its stability, it disappears as moisture condenses to fog, and to clouds, becoming nothing again by falling down. Thus, spaces are sequenced and layered with increasing spatial density till one reaches the cloud in the center, where the machines are. One travels through spaces as a water droplet journeys to be a raindrop. It is a story before a raindrop—a raindrop prelude.