Jetway Design

This past Saturday marked the culmination of a very intense 1.5 week long project, the design on a prototypical jetway for the Oakland Airport. This was the first step in our quarter long project for designing a new Terminal Two for Oakland Airport. Our project through gradient interfaces between structure, aperture and graphical "control lines" applied to the jetway.

We started off the exercise by quickly looking at structural capacity needed to support the 115' long jetway as it spanned from terminal to airplane. The cladding was developed by studying movable surfaces such as escalators, tank tread, as well as examples in nature such as snake skin. After covering the jetway structure in a panel system, control lines were applied horizontally to the facade which split and joined together to create multiple rhythms working to accentuate the linearity of the space.

It was a short, but very intense exercise. Personally I found it a bit difficult to get started as the project was lacking in any real programmatic or conceptual depth, but it was mainly designed to be a modelling exercise so you have to judge it at face value.

Now we are moving on the real terminal design. Massing studies are due tomorrow...