 | | This senior-year project involved making an intervention at Kitt Peak, outside of Tucson, AZ -- where there are more astronomical observatories than any other place on earth. In order to understand the site, I created a model of the entire mountaintop, manually digitizing a USGS elevation map at 5 ft increments, mapping Russian satellite imagery onto it, and modeling every telescope on the peak. The resultant model had over 7 million polygons. (This project was done in conjunction with Wesley James) |
 | | Using this model, I was able to analyze the peak from every angle, at every season, and at every time of the year -- and see how my own interventions would effect everything else on the peak. Even the astronomers' footpaths through the woods were visible in the Russian satellite imagery. |
 | | One of my own designs for the peak was for new astronomer dormitories. I surveyed over 35 astronomers who had worked at Kitt Peak to find out what they wanted in a dormitory space. The bedrooms had to remain dark during the day, while the astronomers slept, but light up at night. I accomplished this by creating very deeply shaded west-facing windows above the bedrooms. Near sunset, the low-angled light of the sun would finally penetrate this alcove, bouncing reflected light throughout the room. The renderings above show this process, in ten minute increments leading up to sunset. The radiosity rendering technique used is very time consuming (each frame took over two hours to render), but provides an extremely accurate simulation of how light will behave in almost any space. |
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