September & October 2007

10-28-2007 Window Seats Sculpture and Building

While listening to a semi-interesting TED talk I started playing around with TINs. Always a dangerous temptation for me. Dangerous because of the potential time suck of the models. The theme of this particular model is thick walls with cut outs that would make cozy window seats. I don't believe I've ever seen a high-rise with window seats. Anyway, I think the sculpture works better than the building.

10-28-2007 Beautiful Autumn Maple Leaves

I saw some particularly stunning Maple leaves on a tree at work. I brought home three and scanned them. The following images all come from one of the three leaves. The final two images are from models in which I was exploring SketchUp's projected texture feature. 

10-21-2007 Tree Building

An office building with an outer shell supported by fluid vine-like columnar supports. The shell allows the interior of the building to open up. Interior spaces on each floor are behind glass walls to provide climate control, privacy and sound control. Terraces provide excellent access to vegetation, light, views and air. This is one of the more complex models I've created and comes the closet yet to a vision I have for high-rise buildings that put people closer to nature. The model required all the SketchUp tricks I've been accumulating over the past couple of years.

10-14-2007 Summer Farewell

I picked up a beautiful oak leaf and took some photographs of it with a strong light source behind it. I didn't want to spend the time and effort to trace the outlines of the leaf so I did a rough outline which included lots of the dark space around the leaf images. I shaped these into bowl like shapes, and put four of these together into a vase like shape. The image below shows the result.
 

10-14-2007 Getting Ready

The following image is from a quick concept study for a new building idea. I like the simplicity of the image, especially after the busyness of the swirl models.

10-14-2007 More Swirl Models

The following three images are of models made using duplication and rotation. I've done a lot of models using rotation in the past. The difference with these is I was starting with imported images and was exploring the effects I could get.

10-8-2007 Color Swirl

To create the curved lines in the "Taking Some Lines for a Walk" model I used some TIN surfaces which were so visually interesting that I kept them around waiting for the ol' noggin to come up with some ideas. Eventually said noggin produced the two notions which appear below.

10-8-2007 Squiggly Building

Someone on the 3d-warehouse with a user id of DrWalrus uploaded a little model called Squiggly. I liked the shape and after playing around with it a bit came up with this model. I made the model very quickly and it has a few flaws, but I think the shape is quite compelling.

10-8-2007 Mayflower

Took a photo I have of my parents, manipulated it a bit in SketchUp, then rotated it around a corner of the tilted image.

10-8-2007 Computer Controlled Facade Experiment

The image below is from a model in which I'm experimenting with the concept of computer controlled facade panels. Each panel's movement would be controlled by a computer program, allowing for the creation of dynamic building facade art.

9-22-2007 Taking Some Lines for a Walk

The term is Paul Klee's. It was much more tedious than I would have liked to walk these particular lines.

9-22-2007 Sassafras Leaves House

Another "Leaf House." This one using Sassafras leaves. In this model I successfully worked through a number of design issues that I struggled with in earlier leaf houses. I was also able to upload the model to the 3D Warehouse (unlike the earlier models which the warehouse didn't like) so if you want to play with the house in SketchUp you can download it here.

9-22-2007 Building a Leaf House

I spent a few days developing some design ideas needed if one was to actually build a leaf house. I feel pretty good about the progress I made. The construction possiblity seems quite feasibile to me, although there are certainly many details that still need to be worked out. The most fully developed model of this House 2.0 design study is located here.