When you do any kind of design for a living, unless you’re some kind of a poser, you really love all design. You gain an appreciation for the how and why of other people’s work and the problems they were solving – especially if it’s a new problem, or new solution to an old problem. The questions and the investigations can be pretty obsessive, border on the strange. But you love it – providing you’re really doing what you should be doing.
Cut to: I’m waiting for a flight out of Seattle WA, with 45 minutes to kill. So I check out the new food and shopping concourse. Lovely, high ceilings and lots of cool stores and restaurants to visit.
What do I do? I spend most of the time checking out a window.
Not just any window – this thing is huge. And it’s flexed and gently contorted along the wall between the concourse and the runways. Big Picture. So what do we learn from this?
Made up of tons of individual panes. All held together with gaskets, cable, special clamps and some funky metalwork. It’s really quite an engineering feat – looking at it the design exposes an obvious beauty, while it makes practical what would otherwise be considered impractical. The design accentuates the view, the technology of the pattern and materials, and makes maintenance possible and economical. I’m not going deep on this, because this isn’t a design blog, but I did want to share. And I don’t want to sound too obsessive…
Here are some photos.