Stewart Hicks raises a strange architectural question: Why are we constructing permanent buildings around such temporary machines? The AI building boom is transforming communities across the United States. Factories, warehouses, cold-storage buildings, and even old post offices were once among the most technologically advanced structures of their era. Many have since become apartments, offices, galleries, stores, and entire urban neighborhoods. So, what happens when the servers are replaced, the lease expires, or the next generation of computing requires a different kind of facility? The history of the Rust Belt suggests that buildings designed without an afterlife can leave towns paying the bill for decades.















