Data Landscape Competition

Submission: February 12, 2023
Registration: February 15, 2023
Language: English
Location: Global
Prizes: Please see details below
Type: Open

YAC – Young Architects Competitions and Manni Group launch DATA LANDSCAPE, the third edition of the Manni Group Award inviting architects to imagine a new generation of datacentres which fit in the landscape to generate magnificent and iconic architectures.

The cash prize of € 20, 000 will be distributed to the winning proposals selected by an international jury panel composed of some of the most world-renowned architects: Patrick Lüth (Snøhetta), Wahlström Walter Mats (Ateljé Ö), Fedele Canosa (Mecanoo Architecten), Jelena Vicic (BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group) and many others.

“Data will be the new oil”.

Alec Ross.

Metaverse, avatar, cryptocurrencies. The digital world is just as real as the material world. Whatever the activity we carry out online, its ultimate and univocal implication in the empirical world will be data.

Despite their apparent volatility, digital data have deeply material roots. Physical spaces are needed to file them, technologies are needed to secure them and huge quantities of energy are needed to access them at any time.

Datacentres are the material trace of the digital world. The more this world grows, the more they multiply, thus acquiring an essential value and playing a key role for the society of the future.

For a long time, they have been considered infrastructures rather than architectures. Yet, numerous recent experimentations show that datacentres can become landmarks of modern cities. They can be an opportunity to repurpose abandoned architectures and places that are no longer in use in an innovative way.

This is the case of a former military bunker along the Venetian Prealps. It is an architecture that is considered difficult to reuse due to the presence of isolation segments and underground spaces – characteristics that, in fact, turn out to be advantages when building a datacentre.

How to make the most of the characteristics of a military architecture in designing a modern datacentre? How to integrate this function into the jaw dropping landscape?

These are the underlying questions of Data Landscape. This is Manni Group’s competition to imagine a new generation of datacentres which fit in the landscape to generate magnificent and iconic architectures.

Datacentres are the sign of contemporaneity. They are intended to change the face of cities just the way railway stations, factories, and large buildings have always done in order to meet the needs of the time. Taking an interest in datacentres today means writing a significant chapter of the cities of tomorrow.

> JURY