Case study

Deep Listening

The story

A 14-foot sound funnel in mirrored and rainbow steel, shaped like the ear and aimed at the park’s event stage. We ultimately weren’t selected, but I still believe this should live somewhere.

The Context

San Francisco opened a call for a permanent artwork in Cityside Park, the new waterfront park being built on Treasure Island. Chaz and I proposed as The Jack and Jane, our art partnership, with One Hat One Hand, an SF fabrication shop, as our build partner.

The Challenge

Design a piece that could hold a shoreline. Deep Listening is a 14-foot sound funnel shaped like the ear: mirrored stainless steel alternating with a rainbow spectrum — a nod to San Francisco’s history of inclusion — with the wide mouth facing the park’s event stage. Stand inside it and you hear the park; look at it and you see yourself in it.

The Outcome

Deep Listening wasn’t right for Cityside Park, but it’s designed with preliminary pricing and waiting patiently on its time to exist.

What We Didn’t Consider

I revisited Deep Listening this year while making this portfolio. I wanted to see how the installation would look in Cityside Park, so I worked with Claude to create a 3D model of the art piece. Because I wanted accurate weather conditions, I gathered real-world Treasure Island climate metrics. In doing that, I discovered a wide variety of mistakes we made two years ago when putting this proposal together.

This new information showed me a few things: how many variables we hadn’t considered when designing Deep Listening; that the design wasn’t suited for Treasure Island, and is more fitting for a climate-controlled experience, probably indoors; and how much my own capabilities have grown in the two years since this proposal was submitted, from creating interactive 3D models to assessing the viability of an installation and using Claude to pressure-test it against real data.

If I had to put this proposal together again today, this is not what I would have designed for Treasure Island. But I’m glad I did, because it’s been great to revisit it and feel how much I’ve grown in two years.

The proposal’s biggest unexamined decision was pointing Deep Listening, a mirror-lined cone, southwest, into both the winter sunset and the prevailing sea breeze. That single choice creates the two most serious issues, glare and wind. The rest are standard engineering and maintenance questions the proposal left open. Each is shown in the blueprint simulations.

  • One-line reason:
    About 550 h/yr of 1–2.2× sun at head height inside and just past the throat, plus a 3.8× line on the pad in Nov and Feb
    Confidence:
    High: ray-traced from the drawings, full year
    Severity:
    High
    Go
  • One-line reason:
    Open ground on the island already tops 11 mph in 24–36% of daytime hours; the throat raises that to 34–64%, against a 10% comfort yardstick
    Confidence:
    Medium: measured island wind record plus 2D flow solutions, not a wind tunnel
    Severity:
    High
    Go
  • One-line reason:
    About 4,200 lbf sideways and 2,200 lbf of uplift at design wind, on a slab that was never a foundation
    Confidence:
    Medium: V from the ASCE Hazard Tool, Exposure D from ASCE 7; force coefficient from a 3D simulation checked against a known shape
    Severity:
    Medium
    Go
  • One-line reason:
    78 in throat top vs 80 in required; rim overhangs more than 4 in above 74 in
    Confidence:
    High: geometry and ADA text
    Severity:
    Medium
    Go
  • One-line reason:
    Pad on 30–50 ft of loose sand that liquefied in 1989, inside the strip held for future shoreline adaptation
    Confidence:
    High for the facts; site-specific depth unconfirmed
    Severity:
    Medium
    Go
  • One-line reason:
    About 275 ft from the Bay; the inside is never rinsed by rain; colors fade unevenly
    Confidence:
    High
    Severity:
    Medium
    Go
  • One-line reason:
    40° inner slope into a 43° ridge up to a 14 ft drop; a steel bowl on a smooth pad
    Confidence:
    High
    Severity:
    Medium
    Go
  • One-line reason:
    Uplights that conflict with the bird-safe code near parks and water, gull perch, standing water at the base, fingerprints on mirror
    Confidence:
    Medium
    Severity:
    Medium
    Go
The written review
See it in 3D

Credit

Chazen Powell

Concept, design, narrative, and submission.