Ali Fard is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and the Director of MIST Lab at the University of Virginia School of Architecture.
Fard’s work explores the spatial, ideological, and environmental dimensions of contemporary infrastructure. Through award-winning design and research projects, Fard's work emphasizes architecture's critical and multiscalar role within the territorial dynamics of urbanization, offering a timely and critical lens on the systems that shape urban life.
Fard is the author of Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data (University of Minnesota Press, Summer 2026) and the co-editor of NG7: Geographies of Information (Harvard University Press, 2015). Fard has held teaching positions at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of Waterloo. He was a research associate at the Urban Theory Lab at the GSD and served on the editorial board of New Geographies (2013-2018). Fard holds a Doctor of Design (DDes) in architecture and urbanism from Harvard University, and a Master of Architecture (M.Arch) from the University of Toronto.
ali-fard.com
Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data by Ali Fard
Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological development of the cloud computing paradigm, Ali Fard exposes an ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.
Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses, Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the growing economies of data extraction.
Breaking down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization.
Past Visual Voices Lectures and additional content from Mason Arts are available for streaming at https://masonartsamplified.gmu.edu/categories/art