Encoding Identity

What was initially a measured drawing exercise of the existing facility, quickly evolved into a full-blown renovation project. The process of documenting an existing building the sheer size of one of Ghana's largest former internet hubs, was a complicated process, one that involved capturing its various intricacies. 

“Measuring it out was a difficult task to get right. Eventually we had to  get the building digitally captured to create a 3d model. So it was from the model we picked up on the weird angles. That came from a South African company,” recalls Yaw Sakyi Bekoe, the lead on the project and one-half of the founding partners of the studio.

Keystone Architects responded to the design brief by encasing the existing building in a “skin”, a move that not only unified old and new but also sparked the conceptual metaphor of a “cloth wrapped around the body”—the building cloaked in a contemporary architectural cloth. The majority of the expansion occupied the wide expanse of available space at the back of the building to house the additional spatial requirements of the data center, whilst the front expansion housed the power systems.

Unlike many design projects that begin with form or program, this development was MEP-led (Mechanical, Electrical, Plumbing-led) from the outset—a necessity given that nearly 70% of the building’s function is mechanical and electrical infrastructure. Critical to the project’s success was a tight integration between the MEP engineers, Dubai-based Red Engineering, and the architectural team.

The infrastructure inside the PAIX Data Center is governed by redundancy and reliability. In data center operations, downtime is not an option. Systems like CRAC (Computer Room Air Conditioning) units ensure that server rooms remain as non-static and thermally stable as possible to protect sensitive semiconductors. Should one cooling system fail, a fully operational secondary set instantly takes over. The same principle applies to generators and power backups, with layers of fail-safes designed into the MEP layout.

Among the client’s demands was a clear directive: no concealed services. All pipes, conduits, and cables were to be exposed—some internally, but a significant amount on the building’s exterior. This constraint led to the decision to develop a second envelope—a functional and symbolic screen that would visually unify the elevation while concealing and protecting the service yard. Budget constraints ruled out the alternative approach of visually celebrating the external MEP systems with color-coded conduits—so the screen façade became the most efficient and pragmatic solution. This also drove the team to rigorously organize building service lines, particularly busbars coming into the structure, forming an intriguing and complex work of art of cables and ducts on the building's eastern facade. 

Sakyi-Bekoe recalls early inspiration for the facade design came from the globally acclaimed movie The Matrix, sparking the idea to explore how data could be abstracted and encoded onto the building's skin. A critical moment arrived during a meeting with the CEO of PAIX, who expressed a desire to see binary code—zeros and ones—represented on the façade, further reinforcing the initial movie inspiration.  He left the interpretation open, but insisted that this digital language must be incorporated in a meaningful way. In response, the design team embedded the phrase “Pan African Data Centers: The heart of Africa's digital economy” translated into 0s and 1s, with the assistance of an IT friend of theirs, directly into the outer screen. This encoded language created an abstracted layer of meaning—readable to the informed, invisible to the casual observer.

Rather than treating cultural references and technological motifs separately, the team worked to merge African textures with binary logic into a single surface. Informed by traditional references from a seminal text on African motifs, the design team took inspiration from North African and Sahelian patterns that could be rendered effectively in a binary (two-tone) format.

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This allowed the façade to satisfy three conditions:

• Honor the memory of the original Equip building’s zigzag roofline,
  
  
• Express distinct African identity,
  
  
• Maintain clarity of the binary script.
  

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The final result is a façade that appears almost textile-like—a contemporary digital wrapper rooted in tradition.

“I wanted it [the building] to look simple and bold. I wanted one feature that stands out and everything else subtle in the background. So for me the screenwall became that feature with the entrance columns popping out and we kept the rest of it simple and blank,” says Sakyi-Bekoe.

Branding for PAIX was intentionally understated. While PAIX’s official colors are blue and white, they requested no external signage or color branding on the building. This constraint became an opportunity. In the search for a color that resonated with the site and added warmth, the team tested multiple earth tones. Orange emerged as the standout—strategically applied around the entrance portal. As the complement of blue on the color wheel, it served as a symbolic inversion of their corporate palette. In doing so, the entrance is visually marked, subtly branded, and culturally grounded without any literal signage.

“These were all ways of subtly branding the building for PAIX without writing their name on the building per say.” explains Sakyi-Bekoe, who wanted the architecture itself to speak—to carry the company’s identity without ever having to write the name on the facade.

While shaped by technical rigor and operational constraint, the PAIX Data Center does not surrender poetry for performance. The decision to cloak the building—both literally and metaphorically—has yielded a design that encodes identity, reflects history, and enables function. It is a building that is rooted in precision, digital logic, and speaks—quietly but clearly—of its African context. With this project, Keystone Architects offers a new prototype for critical infrastructure in Africa: discreet, resilient, rooted in place, and rich with meaning.