This progress update focuses on nailing down a direction for the form. The purpose of doing this is to explore a form that is futuristic but yet doesn’t give the impression of a Sci-fi building in year 3100 AD. To do so, I have created 12 different forms with different degrees of variations, and they can be roughly divided into 4 categories: The Far Future Sci-Fi Type, The Sculpture type, and the Hybrid type.
– The Far-Future-Sci-Fi type is the ones that you would typically see in movies such as Star Trek or The Martian. I have created 8 Sci-Fi types that I know I won’t be using in the end. The reason why I spent the time in creating them is because, to know what is feasible for a design, we must first know the boundary; And to determine the boundary, we must push the design far enough in the first place.
– The Sculpture type are forms that are driven by symbolic reasons or an architectural style such as Zaha Hadid.
– The Hybrid type are forms that are inspired from the sculpture type, but added a slight treatment to the material to give a futuristic look that is completely within the reach of 2020.
A small update on the design progress, the transportation tube. The tube is designed with the same language in mind as the main building, and it features an exo-skeleton like structure to hold and reinforce the smaller transportation tubes within. Due to advancement in material technology, this exo-skeleton structure is made with a synthetic material that exhibits properties such as high flexibility, very light weight, and twice of the steel’s bearing strength. This allows architecture in 2040 to grow larger in size, but without the concern of overloading.
In the section render of the transportation tube, it indicates that the light weight synthetic material is also applied to build a web-like structure, using to hold the smaller transportation tubes in place. For those smaller tubes, the top two are for passengers, the two on the side are for emergencies or maintenance, and the bottom two are for cargos. In the center of those tubes, it will house the maintenance deck and all the E&M.
I will post another update once the smaller transportation tubes and possibly the passenger pods are designed.
Thank you!
Hi, hope everyone is doing well during this desperate time, and had heaps of fun with working on the competition. This post will be a quick update on the interior.
One of the key features of this huge construct is a 150m x 150m x 50m space reserved for the installation of the transportation tube and multiple floors of train platforms. The environment design is inspired from Hadid’s work (obviously), research facilities in TV series Westworld, and the Central Research level from the game Control. The references mentioned above have demonstrated that the treatment to a void in an architecture is achieved by more than just populating the environment with props, but also by adding layers that leads the audience thinking outside of the frame there are much more awaiting to be explored, and the space is much larger than what they perceive.
Another small update on the interior progress. With most of the props in place now, the next step will be some paint-over work on the interior, adding additional details, and then do a matte paint for the exterior view.
A few detail added since yesterday’s update:
Part of the challenge of doing a night scene, was highlighting the unique features of your architecture, carefully guiding where your audience’s attention wanders, but without overdoing it. For this image I had a very hard time choosing the point of focus to light up, because my subject spans across 2/3 of the image, and every part of it is kind of important for the overall concept. If I lit up only the terminal, which I did in the beginning, then I have wasted 2/3 of the image for the transportation tube that could barely be seen; if I lit up everything equally bright, then the focus is lost.
Everything was a hard stuck until today at work, l saw this GIF of neutral signals transmission, which inspired me to translate the idea to my scene lighting. It isn’t just visually applicable, but conceptually as well. Since my entry was focusing around the idea of the Hyperloop terminal that connects between DC and NYC in 2040, the capsule therefore is a metaphorto the neutral transmission signal, that carries electrical information between the nerve fibre or axon. When a capsule passes through a segment of the transportation tube at night, that segment is going to brighten up and it follows the capsule’s location as it moves. With a short departure time between capsules, visually the transportation tube will look like pulses of electrical signals, constantly sending streams of bright light in and out of the terminal.
Hope I have used the right metaphor and explained the concept simple enough