Why Data Centres Became a Research Question

My interest in data-driven design did not begin with data centres. Earlier research into existing buildings, spatial organisation and generative transformation had already pushed me toward a question that keeps returning: how much of a design decision can be made visible, tested and learned from before a building is built?

Data centres have made that question more urgent. They are highly technical environments in which energy, resilience, services, security, spatial organisation and technological change collide. The growth of AI makes their physical consequences harder to treat as somebody else's engineering problem.

Conversations with Professor Savas Konur at Aston University have helped me sharpen this direction into a possible PhD research route. The emerging interest is not to design a single data centre, but to investigate an early-stage decision framework that can connect architectural judgement with simulation, digital twins, operational evidence and future change.

What interests me most is the bridge between two moments: designing a new facility with more foresight, and learning from existing facilities so the next design begins with better knowledge.

This remains a developing research direction. I want to document the questions, references, field encounters and changes of mind here without turning the Journal into the proposal itself.

Developing research direction / prospective PhD route. No institutional affiliation or formal research partnership is implied.

Burak Tosun