DESEO: IX ARQUIA/PRÓXIMA, 2024

Marina Otero Verzier is head of the social design masters at Design Academy Eindhoven. The program focuses on roles for designers attuned to contemporary ecological and social challenges. From 2015 to 2022, she was the director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI), the Dutch Institute for Architecture, Design, and Digital Culture. At HNI, she led initiatives focused on labor, extraction, and mental health from an architectural and post-anthropocentric perspective, including “Automated Landscapes,” “BURN OUT: Exhaustion on a Planetary Scale,” and “Lithium.”

Otero received an MS in critical, curatorial, and conceptual practices in architecture from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation in 2013 and completed her Ph.D. at Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid in 2016. She is a co-editor of Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay In Transit (2016), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), and More-than-Human (2020); and editor of Work, Body, Leisure (2018).

Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse explores innovations in data-storing architectures attuned to social and ecological challenges, land availability, the growing cost of energy, and changing data. Otero will commence her research and data collection this summer, followed by site visits to Iceland and Sweden, both global leaders in renewable energy. Chile, a country that is currently a testbed for distributed edge cloud models and the world's second-largest producer of lithium, a critical element for efficient data center batteries, will also be on the early travel itinerary. With the construction of the Humboldt Cable, the first submarine cable between Latin America and Oceania, Chile will soon become a preferred data location. Additional proposed travel locations include Singapore, Australia, Nigeria, and California. Otero has already conducted fieldwork in France, the Netherlands, and the UK.