Swiss National Science Foundation Project: “Data Centers: An Architectural History of Environmental Information”
Application deadline: January 18, 2025
The Laboratory for History and Theories of Architecture, Technology, and Media (HITAM) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is pleased to invite applicants for two doctoral positions within the framework of a multi-year research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). The interdisciplinary project, “Data Centers: An Architectural History of Environmental Information,” seeks to explore how architecture—understood as both material structures and a conceptual framework—has historically enabled the measurement, control, and modification of natural cycles for productive purposes.
Project overview
Data centers, this project seeks to demonstrate, exist apart from the recent products of cloud computing or the so-called digital turn. At least since the early nineteenth century, arguably earlier than that, vast projects to centralize environmental information from oceans, deserts, cities, skies, soils, plants and populations have led to the creation of distributed infrastructures of environmental management.
This project addresses architecture as the mediating material substrate that allows the translation of the environment into quantifiable information. It is this in-between—consisting of processes, relationships, and, above all, immense amounts of buildings and materials—that has made the environment measurable, quantifiable, partially predictable, and ultimately exploitable.
Through a series of case studies, ranging from extraction and harvesting of primary resources to management of communications, the project will examine how empires, democracies, and corporations leverage a vast range of buildings and infrastructures to transform natural environments into controllable systems. Looking through the lens of grounded infrastructure, data centers appear like distributed networks, often producing or reinforcing distinctions between centers and peripheries. Moreover, this perspective elicits political conflicts and local resistances. It is only when European steel touches the ground to build radio towers in West Africa, the bricks of an agricultural station cut through the jungle in South India, or soil experiments reach the coasts of Peru that a naturalized “trust in numbers” runs up against its material limits and conditions of possibility.
The Data Centers project will establish a center of competence and expertise for architectural historians to generate intellectual synergies, within and beyond the university, through publications, exhibitions, and workshops. HITAM invites candidates to present research projects within the discipline of architectural histories that are related—yet not limited—to the following lines of interest:
–Architectural histories of extraction, harvesting, and industrialization of natural resources: agriculture, fisheries, mining, etc.
–Architectural histories of risk industries: insurance, actuarial, and financial markets.
–Architectural histories of production, storage, transmission, and reception of information.
–Architectural histories of environmental science, histories of quantification, and information history.
This project is directed by Alfredo Thiermann (principal investigator), Xavier Nueno (postdoctoral researcher), and Pedro Correa (project partner).
About HITAM
The Laboratory for History and Theories of Architecture, Technology, and Media (HITAM) at EPFL, led by Prof. Alfredo Thiermann, conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersection of architectural history and the history of media. The laboratory’s work expands the traditional understanding of architecture beyond the circulation of materials, goods, and people to focus on the production, storage, transmission, and reception of information. With an emphasis on the built and material dimensions of technological and environmental infrastructures, HITAM interrogates the historical, social, political, and ecological aspects of architecture’s entanglement with information technologies. The group’s teaching, research projects, and exhibitions reflect its commitment to understanding the materiality of information in both historical and contemporary contexts.
About EPFL
The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is a public research university in Lausanne, Switzerland. EPFL’s architecture department—The Institute of Architecture and the City, one of the country’s three university-level architecture schools—is internationally renowned in urban and territorial design. With its main campus located in Lausanne and associated campuses developing in neighboring cantons in Switzerland, EPFL is a growing and well-funded institution fostering excellence and intellectual diversity. Equipped with experimental research infrastructures, the school offers a fertile environment for collaboration among disciplines. EPFL’s multilingual, multicultural environment offers internationally competitive resources, salaries, and benefits.
Position description
The doctoral candidates selected for the positions will:
–Conduct archival research and analyze historical documents and architectural infrastructures.
–Collaborate on the project’s interdisciplinary framework, drawing from the fields of architectural history, environmental studies, and information science.
–Contribute to academic publications and presentations related to the project.
–Participate in the development of exhibitions and outreach activities, where applicable.
–Participate in the teaching activities of the research group.
Qualifications
–A master’s degree (or equivalent) in architecture, architectural history, environmental history, history of science and technology, or a related field.
–Strong research and analytical skills; experience in archival research preferred.
–Excellent written and verbal English. Fluency in other languages is an asset.
–A strong interest in the intersection of architecture, bureaucracy, and environmental history.
Position details
–The positions are fully funded by the SNSF for a duration of four years.
–The doctoral candidates are based at EPFL, Lausanne, in the Laboratory for History and Theories of Architecture, Technology, and Media (HITAM).
–Successful candidates will enroll in the program of EDAR Architecture and Sciences of the City.
Application process
Applicants should submit the following documents in a single PDF:
–A cover letter explaining their intellectual interests and motivation for joining the project.
–An Academic and Professional Curriculum Vitae (two pages maximum).
–A research project (five pages maximum).
–Contact information for two academic references. HITAM will solicit recommendation letters for preselected candidates at a later stage.
Please send applications or inquiries to hitam [at] epfl.ch by January 18, 2025. HITAM will conduct interviews with preselected candidates in February 2025.
We look forward to receiving your application!
