Hyperloop Architecture - Graduate Thesis 2018 -
New developments in transportation technology promise to dramatically change the way we perceive time by moving people through space at unprecedented speeds. For example, the planned “Hyperloop” public transit system will connect Los Angeles and San Diego in a mere 12.5 minutes. Taking the two stations at either end of this high-speed rail project as its program, this thesis will speculate on the architectural opportunities afforded by this kind of accelerated travel experience. The results mimic the lag or gap between the distance people intuit they have traveled and the actual distance covered, producing an architecturalized extension of the disorientation passengers have just experienced.
Point-cloud, four-dimensional surveys of the two existing rail termini (Union Station in Los Angeles and Santa Fe Depot in San Diego) are deformed with a custom-designed tool that recreates how the stations would be experienced at Hyperloop speed. The two endpoints of the Hyperloop will appear to digest each other, merging into an impossibly distorted hybrid that is neither here nor there. Rather, this project will create a new kind of in-between, where “here” is always already becoming a “there” at which it never fully arrives.