Google’s Victorian Love Affair

Architizer News

Google’s Victorian Love Affair

November 18, 2011

Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, England. Photo: John Ecker

When one imagines the architectural forms of today’s computer technology, a few things may come to mind: the sprawling modern office buildings of the Silicon Valley, the minimalist glass walls of an Apple store, or perhaps the still mythical “smart cities” developing in South Korea, rumored to be bound together with the seamless everyday technologies once reserved for fanciful science fiction.

But as we are realizing more and more, the invisible workings of technology can still come in rather dated architectural shells: case in point, the 24-story Art Deco building that houses a sizable chunk of the internet’s physical infrastructure. Moreover, as we learned from the BBC, even the increasingly formless technology giant Google has turned its attention to a sort of search for concrete origins, a hunt for the ancient Rome of the Internet. This brought them to a dilapidated old Victorian compound in Buckinghamshire, England. Read on.

Photo via.

Photo via Wikipedia.

The ornamented facades of Bletchley Park are characteristically English: their seemingly haphazard agglutinative composition lends itself to eccentric formal hybrids, such as the plain, shingled roof oddly fused into a patina bell-shaped dome and the lyrically staggered chimneys and overlapping arcades. Before the 1970s, no one would suspect that this hodgepodge of colorful forms was once home to something even more complex: two massive code-breaking machines pioneering the work of famed mathematician Alan Turing.

The code-breaking machine Colossus at work. The computer was smashed into pieces for security reasons on the orders of Winston Churchill. Photo via.

Behind these picturesque closed doors, Turing worked with a team to break the code of the German Enigma machine during World War II, a valiant effort that is believed to have shortened the war by two years. Though restricted to a single task, the massive code-breaking machines known as Colossus and Bombe are considered the forerunners of modern computers. As Gordon Corera of the BBC explained, the work of Turing and his fellow code-breakers lay the foundation for all computing technology, including the algorithms behind Google’s internet search and page-ranking technology.

A working replica of the Colossus, showing the decrypted message is produced on ticker tape. Photo via.

However, the military stronghold on the physical and intellectual property at Bletchley Park has taken its toll. Veiled in tight-lipped secrecy until 1970, Bletchley Park lay unnoticed, boarded up and neglected, and the Victorian manor house fell into disrepair. According to the BBC, a tweet about Turing’s papers put up for sale led a British-born Google employee to pursue the story, which eventually unfolded into a plan for Google to purchase the papers and to put up the over $3m needed to restore the derelict Block C at Bletchley Park.

Simon Meacham, the British cloud computing executive who started it all, made clear that Google’s investment is not an attempt to subsume the legacy of Bletchley Park. Instead, it is the beginning of a hope that this historic birthplace of computer technology, a once thriving site of innovation cut short by military seizure, will flourish again. However, we can’t help but think the rhythm of Bletchley’s colorful, oddly shaped facade feels strangely akin to Google’s iconic rainbow logo…