Data centre in an existing building — Singapore
An existing four-storey industrial building adapted for data centre use. The structure and the floor-to-floor height were fixed; everything inside had to work around them.
Stock image (Ricardo Gomez Angel / Unsplash) — not a photograph of this project.
Re-use gives you half the building for free and imposes the other half. What stood here decided nearly everything: the grid, the floor loading, and above all the floor-to-floor height.
That height is where it all comes to a head. A raised floor, a ceiling zone for cable and air, and a workable clear height have to fit together inside a dimension chosen years earlier for something else entirely. It inverts the design question: not how much fits, but what can be given up.
From outside the intervention is barely legible, and that is the gain. What has been added — cable containment across the facade, ventilation louvres, standby power in the yard — reads as services on an existing building rather than as a new envelope.
The building sits on a tight industrial plot with neighbours on two sides, which makes logistics during the conversion as much a design question as the plan is.
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