Green-facade data centre — Singapore
In the tropics a data centre's energy disappears into cooling. Here the facade is planted across its full height — not as a gesture, but as a line in the energy model the building was tested against for Green Mark.
Stock image (Arno Senoner / Unsplash) — not a photograph of this project.
A data centre one degree off the equator fights the same load all year. The first place to win anything back is not the chiller but the envelope.
The planting keeps sun off the structure and lowers the facade’s surface temperature. This is not greenwashing: the effect is counted in the energy models the design was tested against for LEEDv4 and Green Mark. That makes the facade a piece of plant that happens also to be beautiful.
It does demand detailing a blind facade does not — a support system for the planting, irrigation, and a junction that keeps maintenance possible without opening up the build-up.
Inside, the building is exactly what you would expect, and that plainness is the point. Raised floors, perforated tiles on the cold aisle, cooling units along the facade line. The planting does its work outside; the data hall stays a data hall.
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