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...

Superglow Soiree!

Photos courtesy of Umberorama

it's been a while...

Life has been on the busy side lately. In studio I am working on an airport terminal design for the Oakland Airport. The project is developing in a somewhat unusual fashion, starting at a small, detail scale and then working towards the complete building design. I've been working on developing gradient relationships between structure and skin in the design of the jetway. My Maya skills have progressed significantly in the past week as I've gone from surface/polygon modeling to using IK handles, animation and scripting to develop this project as an interweaving of multiple mesh structures operating on separate gradients. Everything is looking a bit overwhelming at the moment: we have a review on Friday which is going to require an animation, drawings, renderings and a detail scale model. I've posted a few process images below.

This past Friday, our tech seminar group held the Superglow Soiree, in the Silverlake-Korea town area at Liz's loft. The party was a great success... we actually had a number of passerby's take a peek inside to see the work and then just donate money towards our installation. I think we had somewhere along the lines of 150 people drop by, including SCI-Arc and UCLA students, as well as a number of people in music industry. Pictures will be posted soon.

Final Milling

Most of the re-modelling has been completed and last night we began to mill our final molds. The process has been divided into three parts, 1) testing several new pieces for fitting a structural capacity, 2) vacuum forming previously tested substrate panels to test vertical connections on our existing mockup, and 3) to begin milling some of our final molds that have already been tested for lighting, connections etc.
We have decided to do a fitting test with one complete "tube" segment, comprising of six separate parts, and attaching this to a yet untested iteration of the substrate panel. If everything goes together smoothly, the parts can be used for the final production, but if changes need to be made everything should be able to be tested using this mockup.
As I write we are in the process of milling, I'll post images as soon as the job is finished. Following are a few images of the milling files which have been set up.