Sunny Days, Millipedes, and Airplanes

After an intensive couple weeks concentrating on wrapping up Superglow, I am finally back full time on the Oakland Airport Terminal. This past Monday the class took a short flight up to Oakland to get a behind the scenes tour of the facilities. We also were able to spend some time enjoying San Francisco on the nicest day so far of this year. The weather was sunny and in the upper 80's. Beautiful! The SF Federal building is nearly complete, and I was also able to see Pier Luigi Nervi's incredible church. It never ceases to amaze me what architects and engineers were able to accomplish fourty years ago using hand drafting and slide rules.

I've been studying examples of joints and scales in nature, looking a lot at millipedes and iguanas. Our airport terminal is developing around the idea of programmatic and circulation core from which grow jetways, much as many legs attach to a central skeletal system.

Pictures

Apparently "this evening" really means 4 am... I am posting some images from the past week of our project. I have some higher quality images of the final installed pieces that I will try to get uploaded soon.

Time for a breather...

I haven't been able to post for a while, the past two weeks have been incredibly busy trying to get our installation ready. After many nights of three or four hours of sleep, plus a couple all nighters, we successfully installed our project in Silverlake yesterday for the Nokia photoshoot. This was a sort of warm-up run for the final installation on May 25th, but it allowed us to complete fabrication and work out kinks in the lighting and connections before the piece went up for public display.
I'll be posting photographs of the final construction process as well as the finished installation this evening.

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...