San Jose Airport Expansion proposal

This is a proposal for the new terminal parking lot facade for the San Jose airport's new terminal.

Christian Moeller was given the facade on the street side of the lot and he's already planning on doing this chain link fence bit map image thing that he did in seattle.

So he wanted to do something on the other side as well.

the idea was to create a fluorescent light facade that would look interesting and can animate

so something like a dan flavin,with casey reas
and a dash of realities united

Sounds like a good combination right!
haha

well, some early studies by Jan Elder from Realities United showed that readable image can be very easily produced by a system of florescent lights. However, the system seems to only work in a matrix format where each light represents a pixel essentially. The architecture unfortunately would make such a matrix look uninteresting (I mean, bix is so cool cause of the curved surface). So I endeavored to first create an interesting random distribution first.

Christian wanted a distribution with a dense area and a non-dense area. To do this using a algorithm would make it uninteresting. So I created a program which dispersed 3000 florescent lights in segments of 1 bulb, 2 bulbs, 3 bulbs and 4. When each segment is created, it chooses a random location on the 300 m. by 20 m. facade. The probability that the segment is set at that location is based upon an image map created in photoshop, thus allowing me to control the density of the facade in a more organic way.

here is some studies ( click for enlarged view)
With this distribution, it leans itself easily to a random blinking animation as you see below

However, the facade still needed to display representational imagery (because, let's face it, it grabs you more). So then I programmed the lights of each segment to light up based on region instead of what segment it is on. Thus accomplishing the matrix pixel image animation without compromising the distribution.

this is the end result: people walking