On the evening of 21st May 1956, the London Fire Brigade received a call at 21:45. The duty barman at the Goodge Street Deep Shelter on Tottenham Court Road witnessed smoke coming from the mess room through its door, slightly ajar, and entered to see the partition next to the spiral staircase in flames. Two soldiers attacked the fire with a bucket of water and a fire extinguisher respectively — the building was promptly evacuated, with most personnel leaving through the normal entrance, and ‘a few by the way of the Chenies Street emergency exit’¹. In 2025, the traces of its previous military purpose — in terms of shelter, protection, and anxiety — are almost illegible in the built form, but a more observant passer-by would notice that a data management company named Iron Mountain has appropriated this for storage of securitised data. Upon closer examination, there surfaces a curious idea that the need to preserve the existence of (im)material data has superseded the need to preserve human life.

This thesis observes processes of wasting, material and immaterial, housed in digital waste architectures. The narratives and subjectivities of data, data architectures, and digital waste architectures, are examined as three case studies. These three digital waste architectures, retrofitted to house, store, and destroy data, are as follows: the Eisenhower Centre, an emergency exit to a WWII bunker known as the Goodge Street Deep Shelter; the UCL data centre in Torrington Place; and a third, immaterial site of fragments collected from the Internet.

Through these, I hypothesise that the built environment is organised invisibly to house the storage and destruction of data. This comes embedded with the more explicit and visible understandings that these architectures proliferate with their built forms. Architecture is concrete, material, and explicitly grounded in material reality, but it is also a vessel in which immaterial processes are organised, contained, and distributed. The relationship between these heavily armoured sites and the contrasting immateriality of data — in the form of discrete, quantifiable bits and bytes of information, as well as other digital material such as the web, software, the cloud, and so on — beckons a deeper examination in the material and immaterial implications and consequences of these variable states of reality.

On processes of destruction and wasting of data, human, and architecture that occur in these sites: I contextualise these within a wider framework of activities that take place and form these digital waste architectures by describing the mixing and entanglements of digital and human properties that occur within and around these architectures. In this thesis, I hypothesise that we are able to insert subjectivities into objects commonly perceived as objective: architectural components and data, and the entanglements between text, image, word, place, body, and various other materials that document these processes.

The three sites tell the invisible story of the anxieties that surround information, communication; data as an ‘immaterial’ object to be securitised to extreme, existential extents; and the ‘vulnerable materiality’² of these entities that house data, in the form of server farms, hard drives, and even physical documents. The constant threat of existential insecurity that has been carried forward from as early as WWII, through to the Cold War, and till today, has informed this constant anxiety that surround computing and data imaginaries in today’s terms.

Here, in this short explanatory piece, I offer a condensed fragment of these digital waste narratives that come entangled with these architectures. The historical material I scrutinise represents physical and digital, material and immaterial architectural objects and subjects, and I aim to highlight their special relationship with waste. In the full thesis I complicate these objects and subjects by documenting their processes of waste and wasting – in the form of retrofit, destruction, displacement, and disposal – rather than a more familiar logic of construction or production. These four ‘typologies’ are situated within the wider framework of subjectivities surrounding digital waste architectures, and as descriptors of the flows of data and waste data. I will now provide a short, perhaps a bit too limited, summary of one of the complications I offer in the thesis.

Bunker-as-data-centre

The fragility and vulnerability of the material reality of both human shelter and data shelter are both rooted in anxiety — for wartime purposes, the anxiety of loss of life; and for data storage purposes, loss of data. There is the overarching sense of threat towards the materiality of both human and data. The fear of data loss is compounded onto the bunker’s wartime use as shelter for humans, in which the architectural elements like thick, concrete walls, ultra deep-level structures to sealed from surface-level worries like ‘terrorists, nukes, floods’³, transforms the hermetic seal from outside from human-centric to data-centric.

Anxieties surround the human, as life and its preservation; anxieties surround data as ‘personal doomsdays’⁴ such as data leaks, data loss, and any sort of deviation from its purpose as discrete, quantifiable, and reliable mode of the machinic transmission of information. These anxieties surround destruction and the potential of destruction. Something as ‘objective’ as these bits and bytes — as we know, carry on their embedded inequities in the form of datasets constructed in unethical ways, but also, enforce a strange variable state where the reliability of standardised units of existence are at odds with its fragile materiality in the hard drives and server farms that require ‘bunkering up’ and extreme securitisation.

This forms one nice, convenient, profit-driven reason to render the data — and its potential destruction — visible and material, where anxieties of personal doomsdays are capitalised to sell more data storage, and where the data will outlive the human that stored it there in the first place by virtue of its material solidity, and its (purported) eternality in unbreachability. This is one of the variable states of reality of this data destruction, and its potentialities of being destroyed, that is at odds with the unexamined imaginary of data-as-immaterial.