Data centre
A data centre looks like a shed. Everything that matters is inside — and nobody ever goes in. So we opened it up.
175 cmlong, cut open
- Commissioned by
- WMH agency
- Sector
- Technology · events
- Location
- Paris, France
- Occasion
- VivaTech
- Date
- June 2026
- Size
- 175 × 100 cm
- Format
- Cutaway and openings
- After the show
- Permanent showroom
Explaining a building nobody visits.
A data centre presents two communication problems at once. The first is that there is nothing to look at: from outside it is a blind volume on a plot. The second is that the entire public debate turns on exactly what cannot be seen — the power, the heat, the water, the fit with the landscape.
The agency wanted something able to hold its own on a technology trade-show stand, surrounded by two hundred screens, and to open a conversation about the building's environmental integration rather than its performance figures.
A cutaway, not a façade.
We built the structure 175 cm long and 100 wide, with removable roofs, cut-away walls and complete interior fittings: the halls, the aisles, the circulation. Visitors do not look at a building, they look inside one.
Around it, the site: the ground, the surroundings and the water treatment, built to the same level of detail as the building — enough to answer the water question on the spot, with something to point at.
All the geometry was validated with the agency and the client from the supplied drawings before a single piece was laid. On a technical model a wrong proportion shows immediately — and the first person to see it is the client's own engineer.
Delivered for a show, kept for good.
The model was delivered and assembled at VivaTech in Paris, where it served as the stopping point on the stand for the run of the event. It did not go back into its case at the end: it is now on permanent display in the client's showroom, in front of their visitors all year round.
You exhibit a product nobody can watch working.
A plant, an installation, a technical vehicle, a process: if your sales engineers spend ten minutes explaining it, a model will do it in thirty seconds.