Today, much of architectural drawing is generated in digital environments. In zeros and ones, in what we call the cloud. A space that appears limitless, yet whose possibilities are predetermined long before we trace a line or move a cursor, by the tools that structure it and those who own them.

Like language, which defines the boundaries of what can be expressed, systems of architectural representation shape not only how we interact with the world but also the limits of our imagination. The way an image is constructed determines the world it brings forth. Over recent decades, programs such as CAD, SketchUp, BIM, and Rhino have automated processes of representation, establishing conventions that condition how we design, what we design, and how we build. These tools and their encoded logics have generated distinct aesthetics and architectures. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the increasing accessibility of computational power introduce new paradigms.

AI-assisted drawing is increasingly commonplace in classrooms and offices, opening new spatial conceptions. Yet as it reshapes architectural practice, it also exposes the material and political infrastructures that sustain it. Far from neutral, its outputs embed ideology while binding architecture to planetary processes of extraction that lie at the center of contemporary environmental disputes.

The repercussions of the digital on the analog are palpable in the heat of machines rendering images that dominate architectural production. Behind individual devices lie vast infrastructures of servers consuming electricity, cables spanning oceans, and mines cutting into mountains to extract the minerals essential for digital operations. Each prompt activates data centers that demand immense amounts of energy and, often, potable water for cooling. Maintaining these images (along with their duplicates and backups) keeps servers running and resources flowing.

This seminar combines architectural research with media studies, environmental humanities, and political ecology to examine the “depths” of the cloud: its material foundations and entangled geographies. We will study the architectures of digital infrastructures that underpin both everyday life and architectural practice. We will ask how architecture might engage in their redesign. Drawing on examples such as sovereign and Indigenous clouds, feminist servers, permacomputing imaginaries, and low-tech or feral computation, we will reconsider the relationship between architectural drawing and resolution. Together we will explore aesthetics of incompleteness, low-carbon computation, and community-driven data infrastructures. We will challenge the paradigm of speed and constant connectivity and imagine new rhythms for the digital world–ones that embrace pauses and attunement with the climate.

Through readings, discussions, and case studies (including the tools we use daily) the seminar seeks alternatives to dominant models of the digital space, proposing affirmative ways of inhabiting and operating in the world, digitally and otherwise.