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Need a lift? New York firm designs a high-tech car-transport system
By Deborah Snoonian, P.E.

The car lift, or VRC, glows softly, as if welcoming the vehicles it transports. Image: Courtesy Roart

It’s an elevator! It’s a material lift! No, it’s the Vertical Reciprocating Conveyor (VRC), a transporter custom-built for a vintage-car collector who stores several vehicles in a two-story lot. Its designers, the New York firm ROART, coined the moniker. (“We still don’t really know what it means,” admits project architect Eran Shemesh.) Combining sleek materials, sensors and actuators, and innovative digital signaling technologies, one might call the VRC a 21st-century machine for moving.

The firm began the project by researching the history of cars and driving, and principal Ran Oron ran across an old black-and-white photo of an early auto race. The client loved the idea of driving onto the lift and becoming part of the life-size image. From that point forward, working with the building’s architect, Derek Larson, “we thought of the VRC less like a lift and more like a pleasure machine—a mechanical device that would possess the same technological ingenuity and design sophistication as the cars it transports,” Oron says.

Poetry in motion

The site’s constraints dictated many of the design decisions. The two-floor garage, only 15 feet wide and 100 feet deep, left no room for doors that slide open to the side or pivot outward; for aesthetic reasons, the architect eschewed garage-style rolling doors on tracks. Instead, the firm designed doors and gates custom-manufactured of stainless-steel mesh, powered by a system of sensors and actuators that elevate and tilt each barrier out of the way. The two gates are installed on the lift itself. When a gate is raised, it slides up on recessed, multifaceted raceways that force its upper and lower points to take separate paths as the gate tilts into the cab. The doors, installed on the building’s hoistways, take the opposite motion, sliding first up and then tilting outward with the help of linear ball-screw actuators. The motions are synchronized to an elegant choreography, giving the visual effect of a giant pair of scissors that moves in three dimensions. The speeds, trajectories, and timing can be changed at will.

Five full-scale mock-ups of the doors and gates, each with different geometries and movement trajectories, were tested before the architects found the effect they were satisfied with. “We reviewed three options: a mechanical system with chains and cables, a hydraulic system, and an electrical system.

In the end, we needed the actuators to make the motion smooth and reliably repetitive,” says Oron.

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