This master’s thesis addresses the critical issue of water resource consumption within the context of digital transformation and "material crime," which, due to the power of global corporations, remains hidden below the threshold of detectability. Data centers, the backbone of modern society, consume vast quantities of potable water for cooling, representing an unsustainable ecological pressure in an era of rising climate change and global water bankruptcy.
Through the tools of forensic architecture, the thesis reveals the source of the problem and establishes ontological responsibility by radically redefining the architectural typology of the data center. Instead of the established black box that isolates infrastructure spatially and ethically from society, the work proposes its reintegration in close proximity to the consumer. As an active spatial protocol, it is reintegrated into the urban environment, where it functions as a public forum (forensis pluribus) in which the material footprint of digital living becomes visible, measurable, and thus socially accountable.
The systemic prototype of this new typology solves the issue of water consumption by establishing sustainable urban infrastructure based on a completely closed thermodynamic circuit. Instead of wasteful evaporative cooling, the project implements industrial symbiosis, where waste heat from processor cores is directly redirected into a neighborhood district heating system. This "0L net" water consumption model transforms the data center from an environmental burden into a regenerative urban element. In accordance with European directives and local energy concepts, it introduces the integration of optimized dispersed energy sources and storage systems, ensuring a transition from extractive infrastructure to an autonomous energy hub.
The theoretical foundations and systemic protocols are applied in the final section to the pilot project Heating.net... in Črnuče. The project serves as a material verification of the new typology in an area that has remained energetically isolated from the primary district heating network of the City Municipality of Ljubljana due to the geographic barrier of the Sava River. The neighborhood, currently largely dependent on imported natural gas, gains autonomous local district heating infrastructure through the project. In line with the Local Energy Concept (LEK) of the MOL, the work justifies the transformation of infrastructure from an extractive foreign body into a regenerative node. The pilot project demonstrates that the proposed solution is not utopian and that digital production can indeed be subordinated to the principle of ontological responsibility. The final result is an architecture of stewardship that does not sacrifice living comfort to achieve energy sovereignty and new spaces of social ontology .
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