Log.Land.
SP_2021 | Work from Ashley Shafer's Graduate Studio V

The project is not for a definitive postal distribution center or urban landscape, but for a site that combine infrastructural stability and programmatic instability to generate an ever changing site.

Logistics is defined as the organization of moving, storing and distributing things. Landscape is defined as the connective tissue that organizes objects, spaces, processes. Postal distribution centers, with their mysterious inner workings and sprawling parking lots, leave space for neither flexibility nor play. Urban landscapes, with their limited space and innumerable users, are rigidly planned for limited activities. Both require vast surface conditions working towards different ends.

Until now. Log.Land. proposes a terrain flickering between the logistics of the postal service and civic landscape.

With Logistics and Landscape come their inverses, Not
Logistics and Not Landscape. If Logistics has to do with space, its inverse is Object. And if Landscape is surface, Not Landscape, is frame. These inverse  relationships in turn produce contradictory relationships between Space and Frame, and Object and Surface.

These expanded relationships between Logistics and
Landscape extend the ways in which the terrains of
Logistics and Landscape can flicker between one
another.

By expanding Logistics and Landscape, a typically
introverted typology - the postal distribution center
- becomes extroverted while the already extroverted
urban landscape is pushed to accommodate
maximum events. The project’s definition of Logistics
does not only include those spaces associated with
the provision of adequate postal services but also
spaces which service the surrounding communities.
This includes platforms, screens, changing rooms,
stadium seating, market canopies, and more.
While highlighting sports fields in these diagrams,
Landscape extends to include other processes,
events, and space.

Left to Right - Top to Bottom:
E-Werk | Hans Muller
Cineroleum | Assemble Studio 
The Hacienda | Ben Kelly
Carlo Caldini | Gruppo 9999
Countryside, The Future | Rem Koolhaas
Playground _ Aldo Van Eyck
Horst Festival | Assemble Studio

The shifting scales and diverse program of Log.Land. acts as an antidote to the sprawl of vast surface conditions. By studying the schedule of various programs, various patterns of scheduling generate the possibility of continuous programming and multi-directional movement by users.

Log.Land. disrupts conventional notions of
architectural stability - immobile and singularly
assigned space, distinctions between served and
service, interior and exterior, open and closed. No
longer restricted by these binaries, the project
flickers - Logistics and Landscape become one
another at a moment’s notice.

You can see this in the zoomed plans below. Log.Land. proposes to transcribe an architectural interpretation of time. The only stability offered through the condition of the ground - bands of hard and soft scape - and stationary structural frames.