Denisa Badoi

Competition: The Unbelievable Challenge 2014
Program: Logistics Center
Title: Unwrapping Anachrony
Collaborators: Bianca Azap, Alexandru Barbu, Silviu Capucean, Calin Cristescu
Brief: The competition had a very real site, in Oulu, Finland, and a very serious room program, the unbelievable part was the client: Santa Claus. It was a ludicrous pretext to address a serious matter: the disregarded and sometimes ugly architecture of logistics centers. The goal was to design a functional logistics center that had other values to it besides its functionality. It had to represent its client with all the associated mithology, it had to become an image the community could relate to and interact with. And last but not least, it had to provide new design perspectives from which logistics centers could be viewed.
Summary: The first problem we had to address was the large and empty site. It was an industrial lot on the outskirts of town that had to become welcoming to visitors, so to fill it we proposed a forest through which we could then define pathways and gathering spaces. The spaces in the forest could also accomodate local festivals and thus bring more life to the site. The building itself is situated near the main acces way and is a simple rectangular box to provide for the best layout in terms of functionability. What makes it stand out are the details and its relation to the forest. The structure is on the exterior of the anvelope, like an exoskeleton, in order to integrate the building with the  pine tree forest. The limit between inside and outside is further diluted by making all the exterior walls transparent. This way, the interior becomes the main actor. To solve it, we took inspiration from traditional finnish villages, making the offices wooden “houses” instead of the the bland cubicles. The result was a real “Santa’s village” that made use of the dynamics of a village to provide for a functional office environment. The connection with with the exterior and the forest made it so that the building could be seen both as a logistics center and as Santa’s Village in the middle of the forest.