https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/alien-future
William Harris
10 October 2025 Cities

Cities are secondary, derivative, mimetic places. The future appears first in the countryside. This was the iconoclastic argument made by Rem Koolhaas in his 2020 Guggenheim exhibition, ‘Countryside, the Future’. He proposed that the countryside had become the planet’s primary source of innovation sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s, a quiet revolution occurring while sociologists were busy obsessing over global cities and the rate of urbanization. But we could perhaps extend his argument across modernity. Capitalist relations emerged not in market port towns but in the English countryside. Communism had its first taste of power in the peasant peripheries of Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. And the world-historical attempt to propose an aesthetic for the future, modernism, developed out of the early twentieth century’s lingering urban-rural intimacy. László Moholy-Nagy, the modernist’s modernist, was born in rural Hungary and grew up dreaming of fantastic futuristic cities. When, as a ten-year-old, he finally visited Szeged, he took one look at the modest two-story houses and refused to open his eyes for the rest of the trip. Why was Hungary’s second city so backwards? Why could it not compare with his countryside reveries?

It has been noted many times that the original architectural typology for the modernist movement was the rural American grain silo: tall cylinders of pure concrete, joined together in thick rows or linked by long, thin shafts suspended in the sky. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius came across images of these ‘ordered industrial cathedrals’, located in endless expanses of farmland on the outskirts of barely-there, frontier cities, as early as 1910, and began to display these strange, hulking, naked forms in his many itinerant lectures and in the pages of his publication Werkbund. They became emblems of an alien future, imminent and universal. These concrete monuments in remote Minnesota or on the fringes of Buffalo were not made for people but for Dakota wheat or Iowa corn. For Gropius, Le Corbusier and many other early modernist evangelicals, however, they represented a new human vision, an autobahn of artistic and industrial traffic between the country and the city, a way to transpose innovations on the periphery to a more functional, elemental and re-enchanted urban civilization of the future.

Lately I have been looking at pictures of data centres. Already when he was preparing for his countryside exhibition, Koolhaas had become obsessed with these structures. They tend to be low-lying, flat-roofed rectangles almost exclusively photographed by plane or drone. Sprawling across the countryside or the urban periphery on cheap, remote land in Nevada or Arizona, southeastern Nebraska or western Iowa, Inner Mongolia or the far outskirts of Singapore or Mumbai, they are among the largest structures ever built. They remain, nearly all the time, in darkness. No one works in them. When technicians enter to perform maintenance, they turn on dim, cool nocturnal blue or pink lighting, giving off a subdued cyber mist. For Koolhaas, they represent a twenty-first-century sublime. They are our grain silos. ‘It is post-human’, he writes of Nevada’s Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. ‘There has been no Architecture of a similar vigour in the last 100 years. It is based strictly on codes, algorithms, technologies, engineering, not intention. Its boredom is hypnotic, its banality breathtaking. Inside, because there is no daylight, the effect of multiple light sources, vibrating machines, is mesmerizing. “Degree Zero” is attractive.’

In the decade since Koolhaas began talking about his love of data centres, a lot has changed. The spread of these hyperscale compounds across the countryside began before Wall Street found renewed purpose in inflating the AI bubble. When I first heard Koolhaas suggest that the data centre would serve as our age’s architectural paradigm, I thought he, too, was busy inflating a bubble. Shorn of ornament, functional and yet quietly poetic, the grain silo represented an industrial model that could inspire fully human, lived-in functions: enormous factories, public-housing towers, concrete skyscrapers, with streets in the sky echoing the grain belts running between silos. By contrast, the data centre seemed an emblem of how, in the post-industrial era, the country and the city had stopped communicating. Nothing in the city would be built in its image, because it did not represent any real aesthetic innovations: the data centre was simply a very large box store for computers. It was significant not because its design suggested new directions for our cities, but because it stood out there in rural Nevada and never crossed our minds. Its urban future would appear only in the vaporous shape of a cloud.

Yet today, perhaps we can say that in some faint way Koolhaas was right. The countryside retains its power over us. In the past few years, AI has put immense new pressure on data centre infrastructure. Energy demand has skyrocketed. There is an escalating need for faster network interconnections. As a result, the geography of data centres has transformed, and thickened: the hyperscale countryside projects continue to expand, but a network of data centres has become necessary in cities, too, closer to tech companies and other clients. We now have data centres in nondescript office buildings in the middle of Manhattan, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Shanghai.

A new project underway on the South Side of Chicago tells the full story. Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park is a data-centre campus for the development of quantum computing, built on top of the former South Works site of US Steel, which will also host retail and healthcare facilities. At its peak, South Works employed 20,000 workers. The Quantum Park’s lead tenant, PsiQuantum, promises to employ 150. An empty tech-industrialism pioneered in the countryside now radiates out toward the yawning, depressed gaps of our post-industrial cities. In this sense, the data centre is the architectural typology of our time. The expression of something truly generalizable across the country and the city, it epitomizes the built shape of an economy where workers stock shelves or provide healthcare while fortunes are generated and energy wasted in a merely efficient, poetry-less piece of WalMart modernism next door.