About the Project
In 2019, I got the chance to work with Climable on their Loíza Fe project as part of my fall/winter internship with the nonprofit. The goal was to create a series of 3D rendered images depicting the new plans for the Villa Cañona community center in Loíza, Puerto Rico, which was being rebuilt after losing much of it's infrastructure to hurricane Irma and hurricane María about a week after in 2017.
Due to heavy delays in construction and other rebuilding efforts following the hurricanes, the local community suffered from a growing sense of hopelessness. The community also fostered some distrust from past construction projects sponsored by other donors unable to uphold their promises of improvements to local infrastructure.
Our Solution
In order to combat distrust and bring back hope in the community, Climable decided to create a banner with a visual showing what the completed community center could look like. This visual would also serve beneficial when communicating the project goals to donors and potential partners when trying to secure funding for the project's various phases.
Initially, I planned to create one high quality render using 3ds Max and V-Ray to replicate the level of detail that architecture firms typically produce when constructing new buildings for clients. This was not only going to be a massive undertaking given my skills at the time, but also conflicted heavily with the needs of the community.
Constraints
Given the existing level of distrust for large construction projects among community members, I decided to downgrade the realism of my renders and go with something more fun and stylized. Additionally, I had limited computing power available to me to produce these renders and a very tight timeline of roughly two weeks before the team had to conduct their site visit.
The Outcome
The project resulted in a series of simple 3D renders that balanced the reality of what was to come with a sense of hope through basic design and bright colors. The renders showed what would essentially be an MVP for the project.
While we talked about potentially having an entire roof covered with solar panels and a clean water system branching off of the solar batteries, I chose not to include all of these details as there was a possibility that they would not materialize for many more years to come.
Instead, I portrayed the building painted in a shade of yellow that matched the paint color the community had chosen just a few weeks prior and included a very standard and easy to deliver set of solar panels instead of creating an entire roof covered with specialized solar panels like the one's that the organization was hoping to secure.
In keeping things simple, I hoped to make the project more of a blank slate for those involved to build off of. People involved in planning were able to quickly print the renders out on paper and draw over parts of the building to show how the solar grid would work and locals had the opportunity to project their own visions onto the image given their existing familiarity with the site and building as it stood before the storm.