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

	Electro Kinetics built the doors and gates out of custom-made stainless-steel mesh. Behind the glass call panel (left in photo below), theatrical multicolored LED fixtures were installed to indicate the VRC’s position and status.
	Images: Courtesy Roart

To prevent injuries (or—gasp!—dents and scratches), the architects also installed a series of infrared sensors around and inside the lift that detect obstacles within a prescribed safety zone, and halt or reverse the motion of the doors and gates. Programming the safety system so that the sensors would not interfere with one another, or with the normal trajectory of the doors and gates, was no small challenge.

The call buttons were given equal attention. (“This one took at least 15 mock-ups to get right,” says Shemesh.) Instead of conventional pressure-activated buttons, ROART designed a multilayered glass panel embedded with charge-transfer touch sensors, which are capable of detecting near-proximity or human touch. When the user touches a panel, the sensor sends a signal to a control room that then transmits the proper instructions to the lift system. The panel itself is composed of seven layers of glass, interlayers, and stainless-steel mesh. Some layers are frosted, some clear, and the middle layer has a sandblasted mirror finish. Four images are etched onto the back side of the front layer of each panel; they indicate what floor the lift is on, and whether the door and gates are open or closed.

Picture-perfect touches

Incorporating the vintage car-racing photo at life-size also took some sleuthing. Originally, Oron intended to have it enlarged and silk-screened onto laminated glass for one wall of the lift, even going so far as to track down Andy Warhol’s former silk-screener for the task. But ultimately the process was deemed “a logistical nightmare” because the five 4-by-8-foot panels that constitute the image would have had to be printed at the same time, in a dust-free environment, with no room for error or damage to the glass. Then one of ROART’s collaborators, Depp Glass, told Oron they’d been working with DuPont on a new system that allowed digital printing on an interlayer film typically used to laminate glass, with an ink DuPont invented for the process. At the time, DuPont’s digital printer was only a foot wide, but a year later the company developed a working 4-foot-wide printer, and Oron had his image panels. As the client requested, the photo retains the pixellated, grainy character of a silk-screened image—thanks to an algorithm ROART wrote to alter its appearance in Photoshop.

Fiber-optic lighting illuminates the five-panel image, while LEDs light up the lift’s glass floor panels.

Call it a VRC, a pleasure machine, or a lift: This project is a sophisticated mini-laboratory of the architecture of motion. And working out the kinks in the kinetics was exactly the sort of detective work that the firm enjoys. Oron concludes, “We were fortunate to have the luxury of time to grapple with the challenges. As Einstein said, it’s not that we’re smarter—we were just able to stay with the problem longer.”

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