As industry leaders express their intent to continue heavy investments in data centers, leading architectural design schools are taking note. This year, SNHA Principal Catherine Murray is co-instructing Harnessing the Future, a Studio at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Harnessing the Future examines how the internet’s physical digital infrastructure influences landscape, local economies, and the ecologies of communities.

Communities seeing the arrival of a large infrastructure projects such as a data center campus will benefit from the Studio’s goal of envisioning strategies to generate sustainable and beneficial legacies for projects that affect the virtual fabric of our connected culture.

Students have been presented with the challenge of utilizing a hypothetical project site to design a project that creates a legacy of positive impacts for the host community. The course description can be found here.