Mapping Ashburn: infrastructural park Featuring Greebles, Kitbashing, Suburbia, Sprawl, and the Archipelago Ashburn, Va Ashburn, Virginia— Data Center Alley —hosts over 275 data centers carrying about 70% of global internet traffic at peak, driven by dense fiber networks, proximity to subsea cables, cheap and abundant Dominion Energy power, large industrial-zoned parcels, and low natural-disaster risk near Washington, D.C. Virginia’s tax incentives and streamlined zoning amplified growth, with data centers adding $16+ billion in assessed value and nearly half of Loudoun County’s property tax revenue. Anchored by early peering point MAE-East, Ashburn became a self-reinforcing cluster where Amazon (50+ hyperscale sites), Digital Realty, Equinix, and Microsoft colocate for low latency and redundancy. Typologically, hyperscale campuses dominate but blur with regional colocation hubs, producing hybrids that combine sheds, substations, cooling fields, and buffer lands. These facilities often consume two to three times more land in support space than server halls, transforming the suburban landscape into infrastructural parks that blur private control with the public commons. Use-Specific Standards (Section 4.06.02): Data centers adjacent to residential uses must provide enhanced buffers, including a berm at least six feet tall with landscaping and full screening of mechanical equipment. Setbacks (Industrial Districts): Buildings must be set back at least 35 feet from roads and 50 feet from nonresidential lot lines, with parking no closer than 25 feet. Special Exception Rule (2025 amendment): Data centers within 500 feet of residential property now require a Special Exception (SPEX) rather than by-right approval. Buffer Yards (Section 7.04.03): Buffer yards are required per the county’s Use Buffer Matrix, ensuring landscape screening between higher-intensity uses (like data centers) and less intensive or residential neighbors. Landscaping / Screening: Rooftop and ground-mounted mechanical equipment, as well as loading and refuse areas, must be fully screened from view, especially where facilities face public rights-of-way or residential areas. By the Dulles Airport Before delving into the specifics of this map, it is crucial to foreground its relationship to Dulles Airport, the interconnections between individual data centers and their surrounding counterparts, and the environmental and contextual factors that hybridize landscape, form, and the shifting boundary between public and private. Parameter/Border/Extension The Tetra-Visaged Brigand Amazon Cloud Through the acts of merging and morphing, the connection to the cloud extends beyond the physical lines that carve acres into extensions, buffer yards, and setbacks, establishing a coherent border and a perimeter used for access, maintenance, management, and vehicular circulation. Parameter/Border/Extension By Corporation DIGITAL REALTY: Territorial Expansion Territorial Expansion Digital Realty’s Ashburn campus spans ~98 acres, strategically assembled over two decades. Their expansion strategy is land banking: purchasing large contiguous parcels zoned PD-IP (Planned Development–Industrial Park), ensuring they control enough ground for both immediate data halls and future growth. This gives them spatial leverage against competitors (Amazon, Equinix) by preventing fragmentation. Expansion happens in phases. They build one or two powered-base buildings, leave adjacent pads vacant, and then develop when demand rises. This phased growth means their footprint is never static: land is occupied as potential as much as present use. Extension of Typology Each Digital Realty site is not just a shed but a networked assemblage. Around the core parameter (the server hall) sits the extension : electrical substations (like the Greenway and Enterprise substations), cooling yards, stormwater ponds, duct banks, and access roads. These infrastructures sprawl beyond the “box,” tripling the effective land consumed. The extensions also link multiple buildings into a campus ecology. For example, IAD35’s mechanical systems can backstop IAD37, allowing redundancy across the property. This creates a landscape where the perimeter fence is misleading: the real functional footprint sprawls into adjacent parcels and utility corridors. Edge Condition When data centers edge against residential suburbs, the zoning code itself becomes an architectural provocateur. Setback and buffer requirements....such as Loudoun County’s mandates for 35- to 50-foot building setbacks, 25-foot parking setbacks, and enhanced buffers including six-foot berms with landscaping do more than regulate distance; they dictate the perimeter’s spatial language. Instead of transparent façades or civic edges, the code enforces a design strategy of withdrawal: the building recedes from the street, its mass masked by earthworks, fences, and rows of trees. What emerges is not an architecture of presence but of concealment, a suburban infrastructural sublime in which the shed is hidden yet monumental. Concluding Remarks After mapping the typologies in Ashburn, Virginia, we began to speculate on how these hybrid forms might propagate into future developments or adapt to different sites, functions, and scales. It is crucial to analyze them as particularized objects—almost like entries in an animal book—so that we can emphasize their relational qualities: how each interacts with its immediate surroundings, while also participating in an aerial, mega-scalar system that is largely devoid of the human. To meaningfully engage these types and classify them, they must be approached as entities with their own independent autonomy, perhaps even a form of sovereignty, carrying a territorial presence that extends beyond conventional architectural categories.