Daniel Davis

🧵 Thread on beautiful data centers:

MareNostrum 4 (Barcelona SCC): Often called "the most beautiful data center in the world," this facility is housed inside the Torre Girona Chapel, a deconsecrated 19th-century church.

When fully installed, it will have a peak performance of 13.9 Petaflops.

North Korean Scammers Are Doing Architectural Design Now New research shows that North Koreans appear to be trying to trick US companies into hiring them to develop architectural designs using fake profiles, résumés, and Social Security numbers.

If AI doesn't replace architects, North Korean scammers will: www.wired.com/story/north-...

While paying ADSK 1k per seat annually and sucking up a 40% subscription hike just because 🙄

And this is part of their solution: "mkBoom fully automates whole aircraft level design analysis, including weights, propulsion, and aerodynamics. We can literally define an airplane parametrically in a configuration file and press a button."

"If something changes, re-running analyses becomes expensive and time-consuming, severely limiting the ability to iterate rapidly." (which sounds so much like architecture!)

Move fast and don't break (safety critical) things How Boom Supersonic uses software to accelerate hardware development

Interesting seeing how much of Boom's innovation is design software: "Most aerospace design tools and practices are stuck in the 1990s—with lots of custom engineering trapped in Excel spreadsheets and laborious handoffs from engineer to engineer."
bscholl.substack.com/p/move-fast-...

The architect is unnamed in the article, but the software is not.

Buried in this article on AI in the food industry: chefs using Midjourney to create the concept sketches for designers/architects. What happens when an AI takes over briefing and conceptual design? www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/d...

Home - (Y)OURSPACE Welcome to the 4th edition of (Y)OUR SPACE—Knight Frank’s global research campaign that explores the forces reshaping corporate real estate.

The full monstrosity is here: publications.knightfrank.com/your-space/2... What kills me is that they clearly put time (and money) into creating this this. What happened?

These cubes are definitely not to scale. And you can't even read this graph without the table. Edward Tufte is weeping.

Bars are all different sizes, and make it 3d for absolutely no reason.

Some of the sloppiest 'research' I've seen recently. Seriously, why is the 5% bar half the size of the 39% bar?

One of the best university buildings completed in Australia this century!

I've written about the Michael Kirby Building and it's radical approach to upcycling the substructure of an existing 1980's building, with a new lightweight timber structure on top

architectureau.com/articles/mic...

But I also wonder if their classifiers are mislabeling discussions about software architecture and software engineering as being about the built environment...

Conversations on Claude over-index for architecture and engineering. These topics represent 4.5% of conversations but account for only 1.7% of the US workforce. www.anthropic.com/news/the-ant...

we built copilot for space planning! @hypar.bsky.social

It also takes these companies 23% longer to hire a replacement 😬

When companies implement RTO, these firms "experience abnormally high employee turnover", according to a study of LinkedIn data from 3 million tech and finance workers. The impact is three times higher for females (and not statistically significant for males). papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Why London offices are in such demand Companies are taking more space than they thought they would need, despite the rise of remote working

Source: www.thetimes.com/business-mon...

Graph showing takeup over a 20 year period in London.

A tale of two cities. -89% takeup 🙃

LinkedIn's roundup of Big Ideas for Australia and New Zealand in 2025: www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-id...

Doesn't appear (yet) to be a lot of CEOs following Amazon and @washingtonpost.com back into offices 5 days a week.

Latest from Flex Index shows that we're at stasis: 2/3rd of firms have some form of workplace flexibility that allows work from home at least a couple days a week

Almost every day I'm asked whether I think RTO mandates will eventually lead to a near universal return to 2019 patterns of attendance in offices.

My answer is always that the vast majority of organisations have adopted distributed work in some way or form, (1/)

They also see an inverse relationship between office attendance requirements and actual usage. In other words, companies with low utilization are the ones most likely to introduce a mandate. So if you see a company introducing a mandate, it's really a sign that their workplace is in trouble.

New study from Density finds that up to a 1/3 of office space in the US is used for less than an hour a day. Blows my mind that in a city like New York you can have a space sitting empty 23 hours a day. Not great for the environment or the economy!

insights.density.io/the-new-geog...

Screenshot of article in The Independent saying Elon Musk wants federal office workers back in the office in America.

Meanwhile in America

New study finds that public sector workers in Manchester are 12% more productive on days when they work from home. They say "these productivity gains are primarily driven by reduced distractions"

cep.lse.ac.uk/_NEW/publica...