Right in the heart of Sydney’s Oxford Street Paddington, amongst a retail area of very chic two-storey shophouses, stands a hulking orange brick bunker building. Three times as tall and ten times the volume, an ugly eyesore, completely out of keeping. A Telstra telephone exchange. Or at least it was, until it was recently converted into a dreaded data centre.

As intrusive as it has been for fifty years, it nevertheless offers a timely, salutary warning about the interaction between 'cutting-edge' technology and architecture.

Built at a time when telephones were home-based, Bakelite-encased rotary dial machines and telephone exchanges housed the vast areas of electromechanical switching equipment to run them. Paddington was one of hundreds built throughout Australia, firstly by the PMG (Post Master General), later owned and operated by Telstra.

And they were stinkingly ugly and ill-fitted to the place. For over 30 years, when asked, "What is the ugliest building in Sydney?" I’ve nominated the Telstra building on the Princes Highway at Blakehurst. Modern architecture tropes in a six-storey atrocity, dominating a one-storey suburb.

How did those oversized monsters occur? Because it was on Commonwealth land, which didn't follow local planning controls, allowing developments to sidestep a fit within the context. A dominant lasting example is the enormous Horizon Apartment building, by Harry Seidler, built on the former ABC site in Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, dwarfing the local houses and school. A beautiful, but incongruous, building, but that's another story.

Back to telephone exchanges. The cutting-edge switching gear systems of the time generated high heat loads, accommodated by huge areas of supercooled (air-conditioned) space to alleviate the heat. Virtually windowless, save for a few concessions to appearance, they were boxes of columned space entirely driven by compressors and mechanical equipment for air supply and exhaust.

Within years, not decades, of their construction, switching systems had changed to digital and electronic technology, drastically reducing the size and servicing required. Cellular phone technology further eroded their necessity, except as a base for hyper-ugly knobbly towers.

The speed of downsizing in the space needed is exquisitely highlighted in the telephone exchange built in the early seventies on the outskirts of Woden, a satellite new town in Canberra. It was virtually the first build, in a visually prominent position, oversized for the anticipated suburban feel.

Curiously, it broke several planning laws about not building on the hills and ridges, an idea taken straight from Marion Mahony’s exquisite drawings of development being concentrated in the valleys. Not that Telstra cared. It was charging ahead with a giant tower on sacred Black Mountain, breaking every caveat that had held sway since Marion and Walter Griffin’s win.

Woden Exchange and Black Mountain Tower were both overrun by technology. The Woden exchange took two years to design and construct, in which time technical progress had halved the desired volume, rendering half the building obsolete before it was finished. Within 10 years, the building was completely obsolete. The tower is the same, saved by being an observatory.

Giant, bland, small-windowed, and lightly insulated buildings had to find another use. And along came data centres.

These are tiny versions of the mega-structures currently being built. In all cases, the big questions about electricity and water are real but solvable, with solutions to power and cooling found in new renewable technologies, discussed in Cross-Sections 35.

But what if the lessons from telephone exchanges are ignored in the rush for data centres? What if planning rules are bent or broken to speed up buildings, which will collapse the power grids and destroy local environments? And then become instantaneously obsolete.

So, I checked with AI to see if AI could tell me if it could be made redundant.

These are some of the possibilities it came up with.

Edge computing: distributed computing resources closer to the data sources, or "edges" of the network, reduced latency, improved bandwidth utilisation and enhanced privacy and security.
Immersion cooling: to data centre servers and computing components that are submerged in dielectric liquid.
Optical Computing: Using light photons instead of electrical electrons to process information instantly with zero heat generation.
Quantum Supersedence: Solving complex optimisation problems instantly by utilising superposition, rather than guessing through neural network trial-and-error.
Neuromorphic Hardware: Creating physical microchips that perfectly mirror biological synapses, replacing heavy code bases with physical electrical flows.
Biocomputing: Using synthetic DNA and live neurons to store data and execute computational logic natively.
Organoid Intelligence: Cultivating laboratory-grown brain tissue that processes information with drastically less electricity than massive server farms.
Synthetic Biology: Rewriting the genetic code of living organisms to manufacture goods, making predictive digital algorithms unnecessary.
Direct Cognitive Enhancements: Merging the human mind directly with infrastructure using neural implants.
Thought-Based Communication: Executing digital actions instantaneously with thoughts, rendering digital assistants obsolete.
Hive Mind Networking: Linking human minds together to form a collective intelligence that possesses the data recall of a machine alongside organic creativity.
Agentic Autonomy: Systems that dynamically establish their own goals and adapt proactively without human prompts.
Cross-Domain Generalisation: Transferring logic and context seamlessly across entirely unrelated fields without needing specific retraining.
Self-Rewriting Code: Systems that build their own successive generations, rendering current LLMs and transformer architectures obsolete.

I have less idea than the next person what much of that means, or which one, or more, will win. But what it does highlight is that data centres will be obsolete at some point, and then we are going to be left with hundreds, if not thousands of non-repurposable buildings.

Better to plan for zero carbon and obsolescence. Not sure how? Ask AI.

Cross-Sections are Friday musings from Tone Wheeler, formerly of Tone on Tuesday. Amateurs draw plans; professionals draw sections – never at cross-purposes.

Tone Wheeler

Let’s connect!