The Next Frontier: Shaping the Future of Data Centers

Clare Lyster is a professor at the UIC School of Architecture. Her work sits at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure, with emphasis on how logistical, metabolic, and socio-technical systems territorialize the built environment and the implications of this for design. She operates a design-based research practice called CLUAA that produces work across multiple platforms. She is the author of Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Cities (Birkhäuser, 2016) and the forthcoming, Future Farm Forms (ACTAR, 2025); is co-editor of Third Coast Atlas: A Prelude to a Plan (ACTAR, 2017), and States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape (ACTAR, 2021). She is a member of ANNEX, an interdisciplinary arts collaboration that curated Entanglement, the Irish Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale. Clare was awarded a 2019 UIC Researcher and Scholar of the Year Award; the CADA Distinguished Faculty Award 2019-20; the 2019 SOM Foundation Research Prize, among other prizes.