ABSTRACT
Informational traffic runs through fibre optic cables and hums within server cages behind the 7-inch-thick steel-reinforced concrete panels forming the walls of the Network Access Point (NAP) of the Americas. Established in 2001 and operated by the multinational company Equinix in downtown Miami, Florida, since 2016, the NAP is a central conduit between Miami and the rest of the world. The NAP facility performs a particular form of hiding in the informational landscape of Miami. As both an architectural form and a discursively produced conceptual space, the NAP veils, deters and hides. Its unremarkable and repeatable architecture gestures toward the global informational infrastructure covering up the materiality and vulnerability of that very infrastructure. The NAP case unpacks how infrastructure architecture mediates visibility, at once hiding the structural forces of informational capitalism it undergirds while claiming to perform protection from the risks that the system increasingly poses to places, people and the built environment.
