YRM has recently completed Telehouse West, a flagship facility at Telehouse’s data campus in Docklands, East London. Nine storeys high, with 19,000 square metres of technical and customer space, the building stands out from other datacenters, including the existing Telehouse and Global Switch facilities on the same site, and not just for its technical provisioning.
Telehouse West’s distinctive, windowless envelope incorporates a “disruptive pattern”, breaking up the monocolour facades with a series of tones based on a monochrome, silver-grey palette, resembling nothing so much as the pixelation of low-resolution imagery: the aesthetic of the network itself. Together with high-quality cladding, expressed cross-bracing and angled louvres which create a “crown” of visual interest, Telehouse West attempts to balance what McDonald calls “a Lloyds-type building which expresses its services” with “an aesthetic quality”.
— James Bridle on the architecture of datacenters. The still point of the turning world.