JAD Design Services LLC

The timing feels almost too perfect. Autumn weather finally showed up in Phoenix just as I got home from Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando, which means I can keep pretending spooky season exists in the desert for a little while longer.

One of my favorite things about HHN has always been watching Universal Studios transform as the sun goes down. During the day, everything is familiar. Hollywood facades, bright colors, palm trees, storefronts, Mel’s glowing neon. Then daylight starts disappearing and, almost imperceptibly at first, the entire environment changes.

The architecture hasn’t moved, but suddenly you’re experiencing it differently. Lighting shifts. Music and ambient sound begin filling spaces that felt completely ordinary an hour earlier. Fog starts collecting between buildings. Characters appear where tourists were standing moments before. Familiar streets become theatrical sets, and places designed to feel welcoming during the day become strange, unsettling and occasionally ridiculous at night.

That is what I love about themed design when it really works. HHN doesn’t simply decorate Universal for Halloween. It uses lighting, sound, atmosphere, performers, graphics and the existing built environment together to transform the way you perceive the place. The physical setting is still there, but the story has changed.

Every evening, Universal Orlando goes from normal to paranormal. And getting to watch that transformation happen is almost as much fun for me as what comes afterward.

There are places I photograph because they’re beautiful, and then there are places that eventually make me put the camera down and actually study what’s happening.

Balboa Park’s Botanical Building did that to me.

From a distance, it reads almost like this enormous delicate object sitting in the landscape. Inside, it becomes something completely different. The structure, the lath, the plants, the water and the California sun all start working together. Light isn’t simply entering the building. It is being filtered, patterned and constantly changed by everything it passes through.

I kept looking up.

Eventually I pulled out the sketchbook, because drawing forces me to see things differently. You start noticing where the arches actually begin, how one volume overlaps another, where the structure disappears behind vegetation, and how much of the experience comes from shadow rather than form.

My sketch certainly isn’t precious. That’s not really the point. It’s a record of spending enough time with a place to understand it a little better.

And this is exactly the kind of architecture I love. A building that is memorable on its own, but becomes even better when landscape, climate and human experience are allowed to become part of the architecture.

I can spend hours working through a design and forget that what feels obvious to me might still be difficult for someone else to picture. A floor plan tells you how the rooms connect, but it takes a little more to imagine yourself walking toward that front door.

This carousel is a look inside that part of my process. Once we have a design direction, I use the architectural model in Revit to explore it from different viewpoints. Moving into Enscape lets me study how light and materials affect the space, and gives clients a much more familiar way to understand what we’re creating together.

I also use AI-assisted tools to refine selected images and explore a more photographic feel. There’s judgment involved in that step. An image can look incredibly convincing while introducing something that doesn’t belong, so I still need to check those details against the actual design.

Everything you see here is a work in progress, including the image that looks the most finished. These are tools for communicating design intent and working through decisions as the project develops, not final construction documents.

That’s what I enjoy about this part of the work. When someone can finally picture themselves there, the conversation changes. They can tell me what feels right, what they’re unsure about, and what they want to explore further. Those conversations help make the design better.

Swipe through to see how we get there.

The Crown Room at the Hotel del Coronado feels almost impossible by today’s standards.

Not because we couldn’t build something like this now, but because we so rarely do. The amount of wood, the scale of the room, the repetition, the geometry, the craftsmanship, and the sheer commitment to making one space this memorable all feel extraordinary.

What I kept thinking about while I was in there was how much effort went into creating a room that people would remember. There is no quiet little gesture doing all the work. The entire space is the gesture. The walls rise into the ceiling, the structure becomes ornament, and every surface seems to participate in the architecture.

It is the kind of room that reminds me why historic buildings matter. They preserve more than a style. They preserve a level of ambition, craft and permanence that is increasingly rare to experience firsthand.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in airports lately, and somewhere along the way I realized I was starting to feel something I had not felt in air travel for a long time: excitement.

As a kid, flying felt like part of the vacation. The airport was an event. You watched the airplanes, went to the gate with family, boarded a bigger aircraft than you probably would today, and even watched the same movie as everyone else in the cabin. Over time, air travel became more transactional, more compressed, and less memorable.

But some of the newest airport terminals are changing that again.

This article is about the Jet Age optimism of Saarinen, the loss of that sense of wonder, and what I see returning now through better space, daylight, accessibility, storytelling, technology, and a stronger sense of place. Or, as I accidentally called it while writing this, “place mending.”

It is also about what I still want next: an airplane waiting outside the glass that feels as futuristic as the terminal around it.

Give Me the Future Again: Rethinking the Future of Airport Design

https://www.jaddesignservices.com/post/give-me-the-future-again

Give Me the Future Again: Rethinking the Future of Airport Design How America's airports lost some of the wonder of flight, and why I think we may finally be finding it again.Somewhere between the giant windows, the movement outside, and the anticipation of going somewhere, airports are starting to feel exciting again.I have been spending a ridiculous amount of ti...

I appreciate a restroom sign that commits to the theme. Mickey ears, space helmets, a floral dress and lei. Someone could have called it finished at “RESTROOMS,” but they gave us a little more to enjoy. And yes, I stopped to photograph all of these.

There’s something wonderfully funny about carrying the story of a place all the way to the bathroom door. Even the little figures have costumes. The signs become part of the experience, and an otherwise ordinary moment gets a bit of personality.

But looking at these together, my architect brain has a question: how quickly would I recognize each one if I actually needed to find the restroom? It’s easy to appreciate a clever symbol when you’re standing in front of it with your phone out. A little different when you’re scanning a crowded hallway, unfamiliar with the language, or already doing the crossed-leg pose yourself.

I want to leave room for that fun. I also want the words, symbols, and arrows to make the destination obvious. The theme works best when you get to enjoy the detail after you’ve understood the message.

That’s what makes this little collection interesting to me. How much personality can we give something that needs to communicate almost instantly?

Which one gets that balance right for you?

There was one very specific goal for this Orlando trip: run… screaming. 😂

So what better way to start the week than reuniting with some of the friends I originally met here through running and taking on the Haunted Howl-O-Sprint 5K at SeaWorld Orlando’s Howl-O-Scream? Somewhere along the way I ran from zombies, survived a bug infestation and the apocalypse, and then helped dig out the mole people so they could begin their takeover of the surface world. You know, normal 5K stuff. 😂

Beyond the running and ridiculousness, this is one of the things I love most about theme parks. A place I know completely changes once the sun goes down. Lighting, sound, fog, scenery, performers and even the way you move through the space all work together to convince you that you have stepped somewhere else entirely. As an architect, I’m always fascinated by that. We talk so much about what a space looks like, but our experience of a place is never visual alone. Sometimes the best reminder of that comes while sprinting away from a zombie.

And getting to do all of it with this crew made a pretty fantastic start to the trip. 💀🏃‍♂️🎃