For those minding the details, please note that both the design and rendering was done under an extremely tight deadline.

More information on the project can be found at the Farrow website portfolio page.

I focused my project on the idea of healthcare. Basic research revealed that having points of healthcare along the bay would provide much faster service in the event of an on-water emergency. On the more severe end of the scale, San Francisco’s disaster contingency plans are not terribly developed and would benefit greatly from a site dedicated to disaster relief.

Thus, the project took form as a site that was programmatically designed to “degrade” from a typical terminal to accommodate any scale of emergency. Smaller emergencies could be handled with minimal disruption to regular terminal services, while a large emergency would result in a more complete switchover of programmatic elements to emergency “mode”.

The site’s purpose is reflected in the formfinding that led to its final design. The site design is based around dual-layered element, and when this element is repeated in a network, it creates a richly connected fabric with that achieves the weaving and ramping necessary to accommodate the complex programming. With the network established, is is simply a matter of carving program into the site through the strategic excavation of elements.

Furthermore, the design of the network provides natural “lanes” that address the flow that would occur on a terminal site. These lanes would be used as commuter paths during everyday use, but in the event of an emergency, some could be dedicated to the moving of supplies, others could be dedicated to the evacuation of survivors, others could be shut down to provide space for storage, and so on.

Show here are the initial sketches to which I committed, some snapshots of the subsequent development and the final renderings.

One part of the project was to create an image for their “callstation” product which had not yet gone into production. The lobby was kept deliberately simple so as not to distract the viewer from the product itself.

For their cab images, Fujitec was uncertain if they wanted to use photographs or illustrations. Photographs are costly because of the need to gather representative samples, and illustrations do not give as realistic an image of the product. I convinced them to try a physical simulation of the cabs, which would provide the best of both worlds. I built a base cab, into which models of all decorative options (panels, handrails, lights, reflectors, carpets, etc) could be installed. Any new image they wanted could be prepared in minutes but the simulation (which took into account physically accurate models of light levels & scattering) makes the final product look real to the consumer.

I took a new approach for the material swatches as well. Fujitec’s existing catalogue simply showed scanne, face-on swatches of the materials, which did nothing to show how the materials would look when actually used in an elevator. To replace the swatches, I created a series of equally-sized virtual material samples. These samples allowed customers to compare not only the colour, but also the reflectivity, glossiness, and translucence of the materials under constant lighting conditions.