To trigger a Dantean turn of events toward the end of the film, the main character constructed a house out of frozen corps. It needed to resemble a child’s idea of a house. Archaic and iconic. It had to be credible as something made in a hurry, but also terrifyingly compelling as an architectural vision of horror. Louis Kahn famously reminded us: “It’s important, you see, that you honor the material that you use&#; ‘What do you want, Brick’ And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’

The plaza will consist of two overlapping spaces. One space is conceived like a contemporary interpretation of the Souk, the vast shaded public space where people gather during the day. Tall slender columns mushroom at the top forming a continuous canopy of interconnected disks. Like light filtering through the leaves of the trees, daylight will seep through the gaps through the canopy above. Each disc is tilted towards the center, rising towards the perimeter – the result is a shaded square – opening up to receive visitors from all directions.

The Arts District and its immediate surrounding is paved with historic buildings and industrial structures. The warehouses, most of them dating back to the turn of the th century, were built cost efficient and highly functional with prefabricated concrete or steel elements. Most of them offer high quality, open spaces with ultimate flexibility. The raw and industrial beauty of the warehouses is typical for the neighborhood and many have been retrofitted into something new.

Since the infrastructure is the most important element, the rest of the program is integrated with it as much as possible. In order to create a physical interface, the elevated vacuum tube wraps around itself and descends as a gentle ramp, ending in an airlock that allows for save entry and exits for pods. While the pill shaped loop of the tube forms the exterior façade of the facility, the support structure gets extended towards the interior as a sequence of concrete frames with fileted corners for lateral support.

Intrepid’s front façade is created by the strategic stacking of High Concrete’s precast panels of varying sizes, figured in a basket-weave pattern to realize the top of the building’s straight edge. As the panels reach upward they also tilt outward, creating an inviting, cave-like canopy over the building’s front sidewalk. Each of the building’s other three sides stand straight up, maintaining the structure’s signature paneling.