This Open Project explores the architecture of storage–archives, libraries, data centers, and other infrastructures designed to preserve memory and knowledge–and their constructed climates. Environmental control and management are prerequisites for most of these architectures, where stable interior spaces allow documents, objects, and information to defy the weather, the passing seasons, even time itself. Inside, comfort becomes a privilege negotiated between what is preserved and the eventual presence of human bodies.

In a world increasingly defined by ecological fragility, the design and maintenance of spaces for storing information, for preserving histories and imaginations, carry profound cultural, environmental, and social implications. They reveal who we are, what we fear losing, and the lengths to which we are willing to go to protect it. Governing the climate of storage spaces 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, is not only economically demanding but also heavily reliant on infrastructures that consume vast amounts of energy and water while contributing significantly to heat and CO2 emissions. Despite these efforts, preservation is always vulnerable to external and internal threats.

The course is organized around key questions:
• How notions of excess and insufficiency influence the design and operation of storage architectures? 
• In what ways do these climatized interiors organize the relationships between documents, data, and objects, embody cultural, political, and technological aspirations?
• What role do these spaces play in shaping the uneasy relationship between memory, knowledge, and the environment?

Through case studies, readings, and design exercises, students will investigate historical and contemporary storage systems, and the resources and labor required to maintain their ecologies. From mnemonic architectures and medieval monastic libraries to modern server farms and underground data vaults, the course examines how these spaces are shaped not only by technological advances but also by cultural values and environmental pressures.

The subject matters covered include but are not limited to:
• Critical, theoretical, and historical perspectives on the architectures of storage: how they are imagined, built, and sustained.
• The politics of storage: what gets preserved, and who decides.
• Media and archival practices in the context of the proliferation of digital twins, replicas, and backups.
• Practices of compression and encryption.
• The fragile materiality of information and the energy demands of storage.
• When things fall apart: decay, corruption, obsolescence, and erasure. Practices at the intersection of remembrance and oblivion.
• Ecologies of data and memory: externalized, embodied, individual, collective, human and more-than-human, ephemeral and enduring.
• Alternatives to the endless cycle of accumulation–a way of holding lightly instead of clinging tightly.

The course will include lectures, discussions, site visits, and prototyping workshops. Students will engage with collections and archives, scientific laboratories, data centers, seed vaults, museum storages, and libraries. With rooms where future climates are predicted and simulated.

A final project will combine theoretical insights with practical design proposals or intervention strategies ( spatial and material tests, digital platforms, legal propositions, policy proposals, scale models, books, reports, exhibitions, representations for public debate, and more), with a special emphasis on projects that challenge traditional paradigms of storage. After all, the best storage isn’t about keeping everything–it’s about deciding what matters most.