Logan West Working Undergraduate Portfolio 2023

LOGAN WEST

Selected Works

Kent State University

Bachelors of Science in Architecture

CONTENTS

Torque

model kit tectonics as an architectural model

Return to Earth

building on shifting ground a tectonic solution to adaptation

Bundles & Passages Talking Building

social housing for a speculative future regionalism as an additive process

Displaced Ground p.4 p.12 p.18 p.24 p.32 p.38

a word on urbanism

Displaced Ground

building on shifting ground

project location: Kelleys Island, Ohio

semester: Fall 2021

instructor: Francois Sabourin project team: Austin Bayer, Logan West

awards/publications: Featured in the 2021 CAED X-Gallery

The climate crisis and the pandemic have proven that change and instability perform as a antagonist in many buildings dialogue with change due to the lack of adaptive potential that they embody, leaving many buildings obselete. This project provides a speculative model for how we might build on unstable ground. We pondered on how plans might take unexpected turns, and how our project can adapt to new conditions. The design commends the potential of an italian piazza as a building typology, and the adaptive potential that it embodies. The buildings courtyard allows the interior to operate independently from unstable ground conditions on the exterior.

We not only designed an architectural project, but also the land on which it sits. We choreographed the decades-long evolution of the project’s site and, over the course of the semester, speculated on alternative scenarios for both land and building. In the Kelleys Island Scenario, the proposed program is a boutique sip and stay hotel meant to accommodate higher tourism rates, and the rising production of grapes on the island. The decision is made to fill the courtyard in this scenario to provide cooling in the basement where the wine is stored. Over the 30 year time span, we begin to see rooms shift and reorient themselves to the courtyard, creating a backyard condition. In the Resort Island Scenario, we are proposing the program to be a sports and recreation center inspired by cedar fairs’ newly shared interests in sports

facilities. In this scenario specifically, the two opposing sides of the site have dramatic differences in the way they shift over time, creating odd moments of entry/exit and a new circulation pattern with the building. The courtyard operates independently from the exterior in this scenario to provide relief from the uncertain changes of the ground. In the Green Island Scenario, we are proposing the program to be a bio-research facility to help reinvigorate native species to the newly filled quarry. The footbridge here is used as a means for testing soils at a smaller scale. This moment allows for the footbridge to operate similar to a greenhouse where wind will provide new seeding for the surrounding ground over the 30 year time period, reintroducing those native species to the site.

aerial perspective | partially buried

Green Island | 2027

Green Island | 2052

Kelleys Island | 2024

Kelleys Island | 2052

Resort Island | 2024

Resort Island | 2052

perspective | resort island | 2032

We are emulating a soldier pile wall coupled with cross lot struts, a structural system that is commonly used in skyscraper foundation construction. Soldier pile retaining walls offer a simple but flexible facade through a modulated system of walls, windows, and doors. This system also allows for the building to adapt to rapidly shifting ground. When ground begins to encroach on existing windows and doors, the modular facade allows us to conveniently replace a window or door unit with corresponding wall units to respond to the adjacent ground.

To accommodate the modular facade system, cross lot struts are used to resist horizontal loads provided from the ground. In order for these materials to not become obsolete when the building does not exist at subgrade, they can be used as part of the floor joist system as well. This understanding of material and structure offers a speculative and intuitive model for adaptable construction with the premise that the building will be constructed on ground that is unpredictable, and constantly in motion.

interior

Residual Torque

model kit tectonics as an architectural model

project location: Cleveland, Ohio

semester: Spring 2021

instructor: Brendan Ho

project team: Sabrina Pettinato, Logan West

awards/publications: Featured in the 2021 CAED X-Gallery

Residual Torque interrogates notions of force and motion as modes of generating spatial and architectural oppurtunities. Rotating model kit parts at the scale of the toy are used as a tool for design. The loose dialogue between model kit scale and building scale produce a dynamic experience for the user as they pass through circular hallways that were once hinge joints, or rest upon soft seating that was once a decal and now serves as a stopple for the toy’s loose fit joinery.

exterior perspective

The kindergarden situates itself in the heart of downtown Cleveland, Ohio, confronting us early on with issue of protecting children of the school from the public life of the city. We rotated specific parts of our model kit downwards to elevate the school from the urban landscape of the city. This generated an underbelly to the project which has created a grand public space at the scale of the city at the ground level. This semi public space acts as an extension of the existing ground that flows beneath the school. This space is intended for families and school events conveniently to occur without bringing the public up into the school. By using our

system of rotating parts, we were able to use the joints to rotate and extend a canopy at the top side of the model kit. The loose fit connections that are created from the joints produce spaces between the parts where light can filter through the project. These vertical beams of space allow for natural light to enter and flood throughout the interior of the project. Model kit decals play a performative role once in the building scale, becoming not only soft seating and light fixtures for users of the school, but also a plug, confronting the issue of gaps produced from the loose fit connections of the model kit.

Return to Earth

social housing for a speculative future

project location: Unknown

semester: Summer 2021

instructor: individual competition

project team: Daniel Sounik, Logan West

awards/publications: Directors Choice in Arch Out Loud’s 2021 WARMING Competition

*competition not affiliated with Kent State University

What if we thought of the waste we are producing, our energy, and our food/water as loops? Similar to the way products live through life cycles, why can’t our homes and infrastructure pose the same notion of life? Today, rapidly increasing levels of consumption of materials, energy, and services are one of the fundamental drivers of global and local environmental change. Largest contributors to this include our food production processes, consumption habits, transportation, and household energy.

Housing in Return to Earth offers an intuitive and speculative model for self sustaining, net-zero annual energy consumption housing. This model is expressed through a series of housing communities that produces systematic loops that are suitable to treat all of our basic human needs. Today, the average carbon footprint for one person in the United States is close to 16 tons. Return to Earth is able to reduce this number by one-third. The loop starts with the home module where the domestic waste in the form of food scraps, waste water, paper, bottles, etc are collected and sent directly to the waste to energy modules nearby.

The domestic waste is placed in anaerobic digestion tanks in order to withdraw biomethane after decomposition. This biogas is then transformed into electricity through cogeneration engines to put electricity back into the homes. The wastewater is sent to algae farms (also located within the waste to energy module) for biofuel extraction. The biofuel generated is then used to power two modules. These include nearby desalination modules that will provide a fresh water source back to the home modules as well as nearby hydroponic modules to return food into the home modules.

aerial perspective

working module loop: 1_housing, 2_garbage regeneration, 3_vertical farming, 4_water desalination

Bundles & Passages

a tectonic solution to adaptation

project location: Cleveland, Ohio

semester: Fall 2022

instructor: Matthew Hutchinson

awards/publications: Featured in the 2022 CAED X-Gallery

As a response to the renewed demand for city life in a post-pandemic climate, this project creates an urban scale interior passage bringing a marketplace into the heart of the new media arts school. Bringing a marketplace into the school in the form of an interior passage both imposes farmiliarity to the public audience of Cleveland with an arcade-like typology, as well as meets the renewed craving for interconnectivity in contemporary culture.

The passage consists of one larger primary public passage with two secondary passages for more private entry/exit. Spaces shift from the highly public passage to more private spaces as you move towards the perimeter of the existing construction. CNC Tube bending and bundling is implemented across multiple scales to create a unifying and lucid tectonic. Tubes are bundled together as they touch the ground to create a structural system of

the new multi-tiered roof scape. From that, spatial nodes are generated throughout the passage at moments where they touch. On the exterior, railings and benches are bundled with street lamps to introduce the public to the playful and tactile nature of the tectonic strategy. As you move to the interior, bundled columns are then bent to create seating, tables, and stairs in some instances and places for display or lighting fixtures in other instances.

physical model exploration 01 physical model exploration 02

urban scenario 1

urban scenario 2

Talking Building

regionalism as an additive process

project location: Florence, Italy

semester: Spring 2022

instructor: Alberto Francini

Awards/Publications: KSU F CAED Student Merit Award for most inpiring student project

As time continues to pass, residue of the city of Florence’s past is left for us to experience its effects. The seeming disorderness of the buildings and the narrowness of the streets leave traces of the cultures that have embodied the past and present city, giving its occupants an experience via the process of discovery. The narrowness of the streets as a motif within the medieval district is a bi-product of the city’s past. This project suggests a familiar psychic experience through multiple narrow corridors that contain no means to an end.

perspective view 01

Once you discover Piazza Brunelleschi, you are immediately presented with a semi-urban field, lacking an explicit entry point. The experience is similar to one that you might have while wandering through a forest, heightening the possibility for a slightly different method of wayfinding for each of its users, producing a variety of potential effects. The building benefits from the unique qualities of its material composition. Alloy cladding is applied to the forms that come in contact with the ground. Its malleable nature leaves a trace with every bump or scratch, embracing the inevitable human interaction. This assists in providing the

user increasing experiential possibilities depending on the moment in time the experience occurs. The second level of the building is decoded via reinforced concrete enclothed by terracotta clay rainscreen cladding, building a material connection within the site’s context. The material application and their contrast in hue suggest a canopy-like effect, where light filters to the levels below. Talking Building suggests emotion and dialogue between man and his environment through the intangible, psychic experience familiar to Florence in an attempt at a rebirth of Piazza Brunelleschi.

physical model concept

Via Del Castellaccio, Florence, Italy

transverse section

Drop In

a word on urbanism

project location: Kent, Ohio

completion: September 2022

project team: Logan Ali, Justin Levelle, Dominic Holiday, Logan West

awards/publications: 2022 AIA Cleveland Honor Award Recipient in the Makers Category

*installation not affiliated with Kent State University

The architectural discipline incessantly debates the relationship between form and function, and it’s understood that an object’s form prescribes a defined and intended purpose. What possibilities arise when this notion is challenged? In what ways can design begin to address the possibility for the function to outlive its form? Drop-In investigates these themes as a small, grass-roots, urban intervention in downtown Kent, Ohio.

This intervention intended to materialize these ideas in an installation for Park(ing) Day, an international public-participatory project where people temporarily repurpose curbside parking spaces into public parklets. To accomplish this, our team partnered with a local business, Dirty Skate Company, to host the event. The installation sought to bring together a community,

generally restricted in their public territory, for a day of skating. The design consisted of a modular skate ramp that could be rearranged into four individual skate objects. As tools designed for user expression, each object configuration became representative of the creative and innovative nature of each skater.

assembly detail

3d material concept physical material concept

Any prescribed function of these objects was ignored; instead, users preferred improvising strategies to approach the obstacles. With scuffs and dents as their medium, the users rendered evidence of the potential for a more vivid urban experience.

THANK YOU

Kent State University Selected Works westlogan95@gmail.com https//:www.loganwest.me +1 (412) 508 8602