SPARK 761, the Beijing Digital Economy AIDC by llLab., reconceives the data center as civic architecture. The project aligns operational AI infrastructure with public programs, making building services legible as a form. A porous ground plane invites urban life into the complex. At the same time, a day–night duality shifts the building from exposed systems and grid during daylight to a media-inflected presence that externalizes computational activity after dark.
SPARK 761, Beijing Digital Economy AIDC Technical Information
- Architects: llLab.
- Location: 18 Jiuxianqiao Middle Road, Beiguang Tech-Industrial Campus, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
- Gross Area: 35,765.81 m2 | 384,980 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years: 2022 – 2025
- Photographs: © Fernando Guerra | FG+SG, © Arch-Exist Photography, © Tian Fangfang
We aim to reveal the unknown role of the black box, transforming what was once inaccessible into something that can be understood and conversed with, and to co-evolve with it.
– llLab.
From Black Box to Civic Interface
The project reframes the data center typology by coupling computation with public life. Rather than concealing infrastructure, the building integrates offices, exhibition spaces, and a forum-like Computing Power Theater around the operational core. Security and environmental thresholds are layered, rather than monolithic, allowing the public to gain access to the facility’s workings without compromising control rooms or critical equipment. The result is a negotiated stack of access conditions that converts a traditionally closed program into a civic interface.
Two complementary spatial devices structure this ambition. A rotated black box embeds immersive, introspective content within the rational grid of the data floors, creating a test of orientation that foregrounds reflection on human–machine relations. A glass box counterbalances it by exposing typically inaccessible systems and workflows. Together they act as didactic instruments: one for introspection, the other for disclosure, binding narrative and operation in a single architectural field.
The building operates with a deliberate day–night duality. By day, a legible grid and exposed service runs present the physical logic of computing support. By night, virtual information becomes the primary perceptible form. The envelope recedes and a luminous ordering system overlays the massing, turning operational data into urban content while underscoring the temporal character of digital production.
Systems as Form: A Biologically Inflected Envelope
Mechanical systems are used as architectural language rather than a concealed background. Indirect evaporative cooling links the computer rooms to the roof via a vertical field of ductwork that registers airflow as a spatial and visual datum. The result reads like an array of artificial tracheae, translating performance necessities into a diagram of vital signs. This inversion treats maintenance clarity and environmental control as drivers of form, collapsing the distance between building physiology and public legibility.
Instead of isolating equipment platforms from the facade, the project allows tubes, frames, and service runs to constitute the envelope’s primary syntax. The structural grid and MEP distribution interlock, producing a single organismal reading that challenges the convention of cladding as a masking layer. Such consolidation raises practical questions about redundancy, access, and lifecycle replacement, yet it also tightens feedback between operation and appearance, making upgrades and performance states legible over time.
The urban environment constrained the audible expression of internal dynamics, so the building employs image-based communication. Lighting, flexible screens, and nodal indicators become proxies for flow rates, loads, and scheduling logic. The framework is intentionally open-ended: as algorithms, demand profiles, and cooling strategies evolve, the representational layer can change without requiring rework of the base infrastructure, thereby keeping the facade’s communicative role aligned with real-world operations.
Programmatic Hybridity and Permeability
A porous ground level interlocks courtyards, a lifestyle plaza, and interior halls, pulling public sightlines through the deep plan. Transparency is handled as a gradient calibrated to risk and noise, so exhibition and dining areas are situated near the plaza, while the ECC and chip display occupy controlled thresholds that still allow for visual understanding of data center standards. This arrangement enables learning and debate within earshot of production, encouraging critical proximity rather than spectacle at a distance.
The Computing Power Theater serves as a multifunctional debate and demonstration hall integrated into the operational matrix. Adjacent conferencing and informal work settings allow technical briefings to spill into co-working, compressing the time between presentation, discussion, and prototyping. Food service and casual seating anchor long dwell times, supporting a civic rhythm that differs from the 24-hour cadence of machine rooms but remains spatially intertwined with them.
Upper levels explore workplace typologies attuned to an AI-focused labor ecology. Generative spatial concepts are tested through furniture prototyping and reconfigurable partitions, recognizing that toolchains, team sizes, and privacy needs shift quickly. Power and data distribution are treated as plug-in fields rather than fixed trunks, allowing layouts to adapt without heavy interventions. The office becomes a living lab for process change, while acoustic and thermal buffers maintain separation from the computing floors below.
Data as Urban Material: Light, Media, and Context
A luminous grid on the facade and ground overlays the daytime massing with a virtual layer after dark. This network translates selected operational metrics into light, aligning the building’s perceptible form with its computational workload. The effect is not simply decorative. It raises questions about what to disclose, how to aggregate, and how to minimize visual noise. By staging output as a calibrated field rather than a billboard, the project frames data as an urban material that requires curation and restraint.
Internal flexible screens project the logics of scheduling and load balancing outward, positioning the facade as a communicative interface. This choice foregrounds legibility and privacy as design problems. Aggregation windows, smoothing functions, and content governance must be treated as part of the architectural brief alongside thermal efficiency and egress. The display layer becomes an interpretive device, acknowledging that computational processes are not inherently readable and must be translated to sustain public value.
Set within the established tech-industrial fabric of Jiuxianqiao, the project extends surrounding urban life into the site through transparent edges and a planted plaza. The plaza mediates microclimate, offers spillover workspace, and supports everyday uses that normalize the adjacency of civic activity and critical infrastructure. In this context, the building is less an object and more a platform that ties district-scale circulation, operational systems, and public discourse into a single spatial economy.
About llLab.
llLab. is an international architecture and design practice based in Shanghai, China. Founded in 2015, the studio employs a cross-disciplinary approach that encompasses architecture, urbanism, and landscape design. A deep interest in site specificity, material authenticity, and speculative innovation characterizes their work. With a focus on creating socially responsive and ecologically integrated spaces, llLab. explores the intersection between human habitation and technological evolution.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: LuAn Lu Partners Structure
- Lighting designers: Puri Lighting Design – Fang Hu, Yahui Li, Zanbao Ma, Xian Zhao
- Furniture planning: KOKUYO & LAMEX – China team
- Client: Beijing Electronic Digital & Intelligence (beD&I) – Lei Jing, Dong Kan, Jianghong Zhang
- Client branding and marketing team: Zhen Yang, Xiaoying Lv, Tianqi Bao
- Client construction management team: Meng Xue, Zhengxin Yang, Chunran Liu, Jie Wen, Zheng Li, Zheng Cao, Wei Yang, Jia Song, Xiaoqiang Zhang, Huibo Hao, Hao Wang
- Construction companies: China Construction First Building (Group) Corporation Limited; Beijing International Construction Group Co.; Beijing Dongfang Huatai Construction Supervision Co.
- Local design institute: The IT Electronics Eleventh Design & Research Institute Scientific and Technological Engineering Corporation Limited (EDRI)
- Other contributors – Integrated artworks artists: Amy Karle, Richard Vijgen, Norimichi Hirakawa
- Photography: Fernando Guerra | FG+SG; Arch-Exist Photography; Tian Fangfang
