SLO (Airport)
A thesis on speed and form: part airport, part resort, part bunker.
- Location
- Otero County, White Sands NM
- Coordinates
- 32.780°N 106.170°W
- Category
- Architecture
Lucien Mount, Martín Restrepo · Thesis (Selected) + Saturday Review · Prof. Ostap Rudakevych + Yetunde Olaiya
TAKE IT SLO
Part airport, part resort, part bunker.
What happens when our fast-paced society halts? If speed is our contemporary idol, our designed environments forfeit presence to keep up with it. It is time to take it SLO.
SLO is an oasis from time. Set in the New Mexico desert where dust storms are projected to last one to three days at a time by 2100, the building anticipates the accident: as one ventures deeper, time slows, turbulence gathers, and consumerism fades into fortification and preservation.
HOW DOES SPEED AFFECT FORM?
A taxonomy of speed, run through CFD.
Virilio wanted to activate the floor. That was not sufficient. Instead, spaces built to retain people (casinos, malls, cruise ships, amusement parks) were fed through computational fluid dynamics to capture the energy and speed of each.
The resulting streamlines become a taxonomy of formal speed types, geometries that can be re-sampled, in the manner of Colin Rowe, into plan.
SLOW / FAST
Each retentive typology reads at a different speed. The slow spaces settle into long, laminar streamlines; the fast ones break into turbulent, high-magnitude bursts. Blue is slow, red is fast.
SPEEDOLOGICAL PLAN
Slowing the user through plan.
The re-sampled speed types aggregate into a composite plan. Circulation is timed: 0.73, 1.0, 1.14, 1.4 seconds, each threshold decelerating fast consumers into slow observers.
Part airport, part resort, part bunker, the building carves and sweeps by vectors describing both the individual and the machine, the man and the storm.