About this book
Data feels weightless. It is not. Behind the cloud sits an enormous physical apparatus—lithium pulled out of the Atacama, thousands of kilometres of undersea cable, and a fast-multiplying population of data centres with an appetite for power and water that is beginning to reshape the places that host them.
Published alongside the exhibition at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich, City in the Cloud – Data on the Ground maps this apparatus and its costs. The contributors are drawn from architecture, media studies, technology, art and political theory, and the volume is organised in three registers—elemental, spatial and temporal—that follow data from extraction through building to archive and erasure.
Key features
- Published to accompany the exhibition at the Architekturmuseum der TUM, Munich
- Photo essays by Giulia Bruno and Catherine Hyland, including lithium mining in the Atacama Desert
- James Bridle, Trevor Paglen, Niklas Maak, Mél Hogan, Marija Marić and Marina Otero Verzier among the contributors
- Large format, thread sewn, around 180 illustrations in full colour
What you'll discover
- The colonial roots of global communication, traced through submarine cable routes
- How the data centre acquired its iconography, and what that architecture conceals
- Extraction and resistance in the so-called green transition
- Forgetting treated as a feature of the archive rather than a failure of it
About the editors
Cara Hähl-Pfeifer, Damjan Kokalevski and Andres Lepik are based at the Architekturmuseum der TUM, where Lepik is director and professor of architectural history and curatorial practice at the Technical University of Munich.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Dimensions: 230 × 300 mm
- Pages: 208
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783966800389
- Publisher: ArchiTangle
- Publication date: October 2025
Perfect for
Architects and researchers working on infrastructure and energy, readers interested in the material politics of technology, and anyone who has wondered where the cloud actually is.