Amazon Web Services, Ashburn VA

This form that loves masks is a shy giant in a world of suburban homes, forests, and office parks. Its facade is a skin of tactical deception, a meticulous collection of grey stripes and panels. These are not for beauty, but for visual fragmentation, like a zebra, which fractures its monolithic being into a series of smaller, imperceptible planes. Its true mass, a core of humming machinery, is too large and too indifferent for the human eye to comprehend, so it wears this segmented hood to pass among us unnoticed, a lumbering beast in a tailored suit.

The more intimate deceptions are its smaller masks, the unenclosed screens and walls that hide its unattached appendages—the chillers, generators, and vents. These are its vulnerable organs, its functional shame. The prosoponphilomorpha, in its architectural wisdom, knows better than to expose its mechanical heart to the world, and so it creates these smaller masks of modesty, each one an apology for the noise, the heat, and the sheer, ungraceful reality of its existence. It is a creature that has mastered the art of being everywhere and nowhere at once, a silent force that has traded the monumentality of a city for the quiet disguise of a landscape that is too vast to care.