Introduction

Twenty-first century Ireland is fiscally and climatically conducive to the storing and harvesting of the new phenomena of electronic data. With large amounts of waveband capacity on the principal fibre-optic cables running between Europe and North America, it has become a site where much of the internet lives. Accordingly, the size and number of its shed-like data centres has grown exponentially. Yet perhaps more than elsewhere, the intimate relationship between infrastructure, network and architecture found in this building type represents a level of continuity in how modernity was both produced and experienced spatially and socially in twentieth-century Ireland. Despite the construction of the first Ford motor plant outside the USA in Cork in 1914, the influence of a Fordist organisation of production on social life was limited. Outside Belfast, which remained within the United Kingdom after Irish independence in 1921, Cork was the only major city dominated by industry. Similarly, the Welfare State which characterised post-war Britain from the 1950s onwards was not replicated to the same degree in Ireland. Accordingly, there were few experiments with the kinds of mass, system-built public housing seen in Britain, across Europe and further afield. The eight, high-rise towers of Ballymun, erected on the edge of Dublin in the 1960s, were the most emblematic and notorious examples of a very small number of such typologies.1