Hotel concept visuals

The lamented London Pleasure Gardens asked for a hotel design based on shipping containers. This is the result of 2 days of my most intensive coffee drinking ever.

I was invited to the site of the lamented LPG, in the shadow of the gigantic Millenium Flour Mill in the docklands of east London. My work with Mutate Britain had sealed a creative pact so I was surveying the land for psychedelic prospect. I began looking at producing another gigantic record-breaker, although the work on site was proving to work against that idea.

This proposal’s main ambition was to counter another proposal that used vintage caravans and Winnebago’s. This is merely to show there was a much cheaper alternative.

I began by recreating the scale of the Mill, next to the riverside land which was to house a total of at least 40 containers in formation, even finding time to render it in stereoscopic 3D too. Working to scale was important, so out came my Sketchup gloves.

Working at this speed, it gave birth to a new digital sketch technique (this has since been further developed to use on RAW360). The concept for the structure was to blend the foliage and plants into the harsh, decayed metal forms of the containers, the merging of these monoliths and the surrounding urban countryside. Apartments on the top floor were given posable parasols, the reception area and the roof also contained some decorative, architectural follies. Lanterns were used throughout to add to the outdoor low fidelity of the concept.

Z-buffer renders are great for looking at, and from extracting data. When I worked in game design a few years back, the z-buffer would inform distances from the viewer in scales of gray, making calculations more reliable. Geologists call them heightmaps. Its simply a ‘radar fog’ that adds three dimensional form to an image without using colours.