Winston Churchill is know for a well known quote.
Data Centers look like warehouses from the outside. Their efficient and over time determined as the lowest cost way to house the equipment for Internet Services. Just like any other commercial building design.
Like Winston Churchill says "we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us."
What happens if you are focused on a creative collaborative team who would run a data center. Should the data center be designed differently?
An example of different is Pixar's headquarters covered by Buzzfeed.
The beating heart of the campus — and of Pixar itself — is the two-story Steve Jobs Building that provides a tremendous 218,000 square feet of space for roughly 700 people to work, eat, and play. The name is not just an honorific to the late Jobs, who bought the company from LucasArts in 1986 and served as its Chairman and then CEO until it was purchased by Disney in 2006. In a very real sense, the building is Steve Jobs.
“Since Steve didn’t actually make our movies, the building itself became his project,” says company President Ed Catmull, one of Pixar’s co-founders with John Lasetter. “This is the only building that Steve ever designed and built and carried through [with finishing] it.”
How many data centers look all the same? Data halls, electrical rooms, mechanical rooms, and last the office space.