Hotel Maya, Long Beach — gigapixel sliding wall
A hotel on the Long Beach waterfront is built around one view: the harbour, the skyline, and the Queen Mary sitting across the water. Close the conference-wing walls for an event and the lobby loses all of it. So the Arya Group, the architects, commissioned the view as an object. A 180-degree gigapixel panorama, printed and mounted on the sliding walls, with the harbour running across the panels and the ship legible at one end.
The conference wing sits between the lobby and the water. Close its walls for an event and the lobby is looking at drywall.
Hotel Maya reopened on 1 July 2009 after a renovation that BizBash summarised in its headline:
“Hotel Maya Opens in Long Beach After $20 Million Renovation” — BizBash, July 2009
The Arya Group did the architecture, DPS Interiors the interiors, and the design drew on Mayan forms and Latin American colour. The building’s whole argument is its position: it faces the harbour directly, with the Queen Mary moored opposite.
Gavin’s account, published on his own site and archived in 2013, is that the Arya Group commissioned a gigapixel panorama to be mounted on the sliding walls of the conference wing facing the bay, so guests in the lobby kept the harbour, the ship and the downtown skyline with the walls shut. Gigapixel is the right format for that job for one reason: a wall-sized print is looked at from a foot away as often as from across the room, and only a file with that much resolution rewards the close look instead of dissolving into enlargement.
Every checkable fact around the account holds. The source photographs on the drive are dated 16 June 2009, two weeks before the reopening. The city, the architect, the interiors firm, the renovation and the building’s orientation relative to the Queen Mary are all independently documented.
What is not documented is Gavin’s part. No public source names him. The original project page was removed from his live site years ago and survives only in the archive. And no photograph of the installed wall has surfaced anywhere, on the drive or off it. This is a good, specific, seventeen-year-old self-report with strong circumstantial support and no picture of the finished object.
What Gavin did
- Shot the 180-degree gigapixel panorama of Long Beach harbour, June 2009
- Commissioned by the Arya Group as architects, per his own archived project page
- Delivered for large-format print onto the sliding walls of the conference wing
Self-reported. The date on the source files is the strongest corroboration on the page.
Deliverable a permanent architectural print, not a screen: gigapixel panorama on the sliding walls
