Spaceport America

Designing the interior of the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport

Viewport Studio is a team of architects and designers based in London and Singapore. A major project they took on in 2019 was designing the interior of Spaceport America

Spaceport America is the world's first purpose-built commercial spaceport. It is situated on 18,000 acres. It has a rocket-friendly environment of 6,000 square miles of restricted airspace and a 12,000-foot by 200-foot runway.

The project involved designing the interior of the ground floor and its restaurant and the first floor of the spaceship control room and office.

Discovering new ways of collaborating with real-time rendering

Using Enscape for the project offered them exactly what they needed. It provided new ways of designing and effortless integration into their workflows.

The real-time rendering plugin became the studio's tool of choice for conceptualizing their ideas and visualizing their designs due to its speed and quality. Using video and walkthroughs was useful when explaining to the client why their initial requests did not work and proposing alternative solutions.

Renderings also made collaborating with external teams a more effortless experience. It helped Gautier and his team work with a local botanist to see what kind of plants could be in the space.

Using Enscape also gave Viewport Studio the chance to deliver their project with an enhanced customer experience. Functions such as live visualizations and virtual reality gave them the option to offer things they couldn't propose before.

This helped to create the 'Astrowalk,' a walkway designed for the astronauts and pilots to walk down towards their spacecraft. The walkway features a mirrored ceiling made of interactive LED screens. Conducting live sessions and using virtual reality resulted in better presentations and enabled design amendments to be made on the fly. Decisions were made quicker, and rendering took half the time it would've had without Enscape, which reduced the hours spent on the project.

On site architects:
http://www.rmkmarch.com

Viewport Studio

Suppliers:
www.9wood.com
www.texaa.co.uk
www.streetcommunication.com
www.newmat.com
https://www.i-mesh.eu/
www.patriarcagroup.it
www.giform.it
www.enscape3d.com

Consultant:
Daniel Gava

New Mexico Spaceport Authority