Location, Location, Location

When I think of what makes an interesting-looking city, architecture is really only part of it. I think that an interesting landscape, particularly hills and rivers can be just as important as interesting buildings in making a city distinctive, so it only makes sense that I would try to find an interesting piece of virginal virtual wilderness to deforest and pave over for my new city.

New York has got just about every kind of body of water you can think of (ocean, harbor, river, sound, lake, canal, etc.), it’s a little shy on hills. As a result, I’d like to site Babble/On somewhere with a lot of rugged terrain, like Grenada, Spain or Hong Kong. I though about just trying to find some existing survey data from the web, but I think more and more that I’ll make my own landscape. Since this has been on my mind from the beginning and it seems a necessary early step in this project, I thought I might try to design a piece of landscape in CAD and render it in 3D, just to see how it would work. I decided to make a tiny little Edgar Rice Burroughs-style volcanic island about 250 feet in diameter that would jut up an almost equal distance into the sky.

There seem to be a lot of sophisticated ways to make a complex 3D surface (as opposed to something relatively simple like a wall or a sphere), most of which seem to involve creating a mesh in which the user specifies each junction point. However, all of this looks way beyond my skill level at this point and I wanted a faster solution, so I had this idea that I could draw a topographic map and then somehow connect the topo lines.

In case you’re not familiar with the concept, a topographic map is one in which a regular map of an area is overdrawn with lines such that every point on each line is the same elevation, the lines are spaced at regular intervals of elevation, and the lines are all labeled with their elevation. My little island doesn’t have a map because it doesn’t exist and I can’t draw, and I didn’t label the lines because I didn’t want to mess with it (but fyi, they’re at 10 ft. height intervals), but here’s a screenshot of the island in plan view.


After I drew the topo lines, the next step was to give each line actual elevation, to effectively lift it up off the map to the height it represented. This is actually really simple to do in CAD, if you set your layers up properly it just requires a few mouse clicks and typing in the new elevation for each line. What I had when I finished that is the picture below, although this time the island is shown as an elevation (view from the side).


You might get a better feel for how these fit together with this 3/4 view, which is the one I used to make a surface that would connect the topo lines.


And this last shot is the wireframe above with the surface covering it, in a pleasant brown color that I hope makes it look like it’s made of rock. Not exactly a place to build a luxury condo, but it’s a start.

Bela Lugosi is Alive and Well

While typing a reply message to Dan K.’s comment from yesterday’s post, I realized that I had enough to say to justify a whole blog post, but before I get into it I’d like to let everyone know that I fixed the problem with my links in the sidebar. Our long national nightmare is over.

No offense to Dan’s brother (who is a very nice fellow), but I think I’m going to have to disagree with his position that design is not art. (I’m going to assume that what Dan’s brother is asserting is that design is never art, which is more extreme than the other possibility, that design is not necessarily art, which seems so obvious as to not be worth arguing about. Of course, many rational people will claim that nothing art is worth arguing about, but I ain’t one of ‘em.)

At first blush, we’re inclined to agree with Dan’s brother. The designer who sits in an office cubicle and designs a showerhead according to a set of specifications given to him by an engineer and the marketing people is a lot different than the disheveled artist who suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night and rushes to her canvas to paint the haunting image from her dream before it fades. The showerhead designer is creating something primarily to fulfill a purpose or function, with aesthetics a secondary consideration. The insomniac artist, on the other hand, seems to be only interested with capturing the aesthetic experience of her dream for it’s own sake, and may never consider whether her painting might be of use to anyone.

The problem for me is that between these two extremes there’s an awful lot of grey area. It seems pretty clear to me that at least some architecture is art, especially things like the Washington Monument or perhaps Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (even if you think it’s bad art, you have to admit that it’s basically a sculpture that houses a museum), and there’s no question that all architecture is also design.

And if it’s intention rather than quality that makes the difference between art and design, what about all those cultures that don’t really have a ‘pure art’ tradition. It seems like a lot of pre-industrial (both contemporary and historical) cultures spend most of their creative energy on pottery, arms and armor, religious paraphernalia, clothing rather than painting or sculpture, yet it seems a bit snobby to say that they don’t create art.

After discussing things a bit with a friend today, it seems to me that even a lot of so-called art is actually design. Bob Ross painted some very nice paintings, but the way he created them – to fulfill the goal of teaching and with very strict parameters of what would be most appealing to the most people – had more in common with our showerhead designer than the inspired painter (paintress? Paintrix? Yeah, definitely paintrix.) It seems to me that design and art are really two ends of a spectrum that includes a lot of creative endeavor, yet are still fundamentally the same sort of thing.

The art movement associated with the Weimar Republic's Bauhaus sought to blur the lines between design and art, and I think that in the long run they were enormously successful. In our world, it seems that people create art out of all sorts of stuff (like scrolling LED signs, fer instance), and people who design things are increasingly taking cues from the art world. The boundaries are becoming increasinly less clear, I think.

Fear and Loathing in Babble/On

I ended yesterday's post by throwing up a couple of screenshots of the building that I just started working on, the first building that I've ever worked on, in fact. I'm not going to be too hard on myself for that very reason, but I'm going to list some of the things that are wrong with it.

• The colors are hideous because I haven't started to learn how to give a model a realistic (or even plausible) texture
• The footprint is too small, I think, as are the rooms. I think I did a 30'x30' floorplan, which doesn't really allow for an elevator and stairs
• I didn't make any allowances for Mechanicals/Electricals/Plumbing, mostly because I am largely ignorant of these things
• There are no windows or doors
• The roof looks awful and is open on the sides, because I have been having trouble creating a surface between the roof line and the rest of the building

Anyway, I could go on, but you get the idea. As I've thought about the problems of pulling this whole project off, I have a tendency to divide the problems into two categories -- problems of skill The first category is problems of a technical nature, like figuring out how to put in a window, or make a solid wall under the curve of the roof. The second has more to do with aesthetics. Will what I design be any good?

The first category doesn’t keep me up at night (other than staying up till 2:30 to write the blog about it) because it’s basically just problem-solving, and I’ve always been a good at figuring things out. I mean, after all, the software was designed for people to use, so aside from hardware limitations, I’m confident that I’ll be able to become an expert 3D modeler. The second category seems trickier. It seems to require that the stuff that’s in my head is somehow interesting enough, or that my design sensibilities are keen enough that the product I create is of interest to people.

The reason I’m so unsure of being able to design interesting buildings is because that seems like something artists do, and I’ve just never thought of myself as an artist. I think it might have something to do with my awful freehand drawing skills, but I think most of it is a result of the kind of clicquish determinism that we all settle into a bit in our childhood. Kids start developing their identities and look for ways in which they’re different from others, and I think it’s easy (even as an adult) to be drawn to a simple ‘type’ that they can emulate.

But now that I’m older, and I know some people who do art for a living (and done a little myself), it seems to me that design works the way a lot of others things work. You can have a knack for it, but a lot of it seems to be learning technique and gaining proficiency through experience. Instead of turning on the faucet and letting your inner Buddha nature shine onto the page, design seems more about using rules of thumb and problem-solving skills as much as anything else. And I’m a good problem-solver.

Learning Curve(s)

While it's certainly possible to learn several things at the same time, I've realized that it will be more satisfying to me if I focus on one or two things at a time. And because I've got a more or less infinite world to create, I've decided to only worry about one or two things on each building, neglecting most of the other variables and details. Design aesthetics and realism especially will have to wait until I get the fundamentals of 3D drafting down. As a result, a lot of my early buildings are going to look really awful and unrealistic.

While this will seem obvious to most of you and it didn’t really take me long to figure out, the first thing I had to do was figure out what I already knew, which was basically only a handful of commands, all of which I figured out while working on my first 3D project, a simple pedestal for a heroic-sized bust of a much-adored, yet incredibly deceased, white guy.

I could tell you the story of how I offered to do a 3D model of the pedestal for a presentation to the NYC Arts Commission for their approval even though I had only been working with CAD for about a month, but it’s not that interesting (trust me, I just typed it all out and it was a ginormous snore.) It’s enough to say that I looked in the giant CAD textbook we have in the office and found the one command that would let me make the pedestal -- EXTRUDE.

EXTRUDE lets you take a 2D object or shape and give it thickness in the z-axis (for the math-challenged, if you drew two arrows at right angles to each other on a piece of paper, you could label them the x- and y- axes. The z-axis would point straight up and down from the paper at a right angle and is a measure of depth or height) as if the shape were a hole and you were forcing play-doh through it.

More than just a command though, EXTRUDE is actually the foundation of one of the three main methods of doing 3D in AutoCAD (the other two methods involve creating 3D surfaces using meshes and faces or the memory-intensive technique of creating solid shapes and then clumping them together to make more complex objects.) I found that you could modify EXTRUDE in a variety of ways, but the most useful thing for the pedestal was the ability to taper an object that you extruded.

Really, I didn’t have to learn anything new to make the bench, as I was able to just extrude the side elevation that I already had in the computer. Naturally, I had to do a little cipherin’ to get all the measurements right, but it really wasn’t that tough.

Similarly, I knew that some parts of the building would be easy to do with EXTRUDE, like the walls and doors. As a result, I decided that for my first building I would take some basic office building floorplan and extrude it to make the first floor of a boring office building. From this view, you can see that it’s got three private offices coming off of a main room, plus a cramped bathroom off in the corner. The big, blocked-out area between the office and the restroom is space for a stairwell that I didn’t want to mess with right now, but may put in before I’m through with it.

Next, I stacked a few of these generic floors on top of each other to make my building. I wouldn’t worry about anything more about the building because I was going to concentrate on doing something weird with the roof, in this case a simple hyperbolic curve extruded across the top of the building to make a bit of a snow-plough effect. As you can see, I haven’t exactly figured it out yet.

A Change in Perspective

As Sef suggested and RK demanded (once he realized that he wasn't going to get Animal Kingdom in all it's scatalogical glory), I have decided to re-post my bench in beautiful perspective.

As you can see, it looks a bit more realistic than the first shot I posted.

For those who don't know, perspective is one of those tricks like the doppler effect that reminds us that our experience of the world is not "reality" per se, but rather an approximation of reality that forms in our little fool-monkey heads out of information we get from our senses.* A pair of train tracks will appear to come together in a single point somewhere near the horizon, even though they remain the same distance apart along their entire length. That you could use this little trick in art to make a painting look more real occurred to people during the renaissance, though the ancient Greeks were already familiar enough with it to write optics papers about it and use it in designing theater sets.

The two-point perspective that Sef talks about just means that you have two vanishing points on either side of an object that is placed directly in the center of the frame, as opposed to linear perspective, which has everything disappear into one central point. You see linear perspective a lot in those older paintings with Jesus framed by two dozen saints and angels scattered all around, with the viewer looking through some huge classical arch, which always gives me the feeling that I'm falling down a well.

The first bench picture was printed out in parallel perspective, which doesn't look natural but shows the object without distortion, i.e., parallel lines on the object will remain parallel. If you were to print out the second picture (I just tried this, but feel free to get several sheets of paper and test this out yourself), you would find that the lines of the chair feet vanish way off to the left, while the lines formed by the boards vanish a bit off to the right.

It's fantastic that Sef's comment prompted me to figure out how to render 'realistic' perspective in the software I'm using, and my urge to communicate this to you guys got me to read up on perspective in art history. This blog is already a success!

If you're tired of my rambling digressions, I should be posting my first building on Monday.

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*When I said that the 'reality' of the situation is that the train tracks remain parallel, I was cheating a little. Euclid's fifth and final postulate of geometry claims that parallel lines never meet. Anyone who's walked down a set of train tracks in their life or even driven down I-95 would probably get his back on this one. Unfortunately, Euclid was never able to prove his final postulate, and that's because it might be wrong.

You all know about the three-dimensional world we seem to live in, and you've probably heard people refer to time as the 4th dimension, but a lot of smart physicists are pretty insistent that there's at least one more after this, and that all of the other four are curved in these higher dimensions. Look at this site if you want to see what I'm talking about, but the short answer is that we could be living in a world in which parallel lines do converge, like the lines of longitude on a globe. A father and son team of quick-tempered Hungarians by the name of Bolyai first came up with this idea in the 19th century, and it strongly influenced Einstein's work later on. There's also an option in which there's no such thing as parallel lines, called Riemannian geometry, but I'll save that for another day.

Creation Myth

Yesterday, I mentioned that I would tell you a little about myself in a future post. Well, folks, because I'm away from my magic CAD box, the future is now.

I don't know what my namesake's misty origins are, but I grew up first in the midwest, but then moved to the southeast with my folks when I was 15. I went to college at UNC, at first studying physics but later switching to philosophy. Along the way, I found out I was a bit of a sinophile and took a smattering of courses in Chinese history and culture, and even studied the language for a semester. I also worked most of the time I was in school to pay the rent, but when I wasn't working I was spending my time soaking up the local brand of indie rock, seeing a lot of shows, dj-ing at WXYC, the awesome campus radio station and even interning briefly at Merge Records.

Anyway, I spent some time in England after college and then wound up in New York, putting my phat philosophys skillz to good use temping in a number of clerical jobs, more or less spinning my wheels. One lucky day, though, I applied for a job in a design and construction office that seemed a touch more interesting than what I was used to. It seemed like the majority of the job was purely clerical -- doing the books, filing, drafting correspondence -- but it also seemed like my prospective boss was also interested in hiring people with eclectic skill sets and finding ways to put them to good use. Before long I was taking field measurements, learning about how contractors and engineering consultants worked, and most exciting, learning about the design process.

I loved looking at plans and sitting in on problem-solving sessions, and I found it really exciting to be working in an office in which the staff were not only very creative, but also pragmatic problem-solvers, not opposed to jumping inside a catch-basin to check height of a run-off conduit. As strange as this might sound to any of my colleagues, it felt a bit like home.

Recently, a bit of a staff shortage at work gave me the opportunity to start doing some drafting and design work at the office. My company paid for me to take a class in AutoCAD and I jumped right into the thick of things, and (working closely with my boss) I've drafted the plans for several projects in the past 7 months or so. Now, I've done a lot of things to earn a buck before. I've managed the front end of a grocery store. I was Santa Claus and Mr. Peanut (not at the same time). I've written standardized test questions (sorry kids! I tried to be clear, at least.) I've shuffled about a ton of paperwork. But I've never done anything for pay that felt as good as designing plans for stuff that would actually get built under million-dollar contracts and be of real use to people. It was quite a rush.

So here I am. I plan on going back to school in a year or so, though I haven't exactly figured out the particulars, and I'm going to take another drafting class this summer. I don't know where this will lead me, but I know that I'm having the time of my life getting there..

Cornerstone

Chairman Mao once pluckily said that a journey of a thousand miles (although it was probably 'Li' and not miles) begins with a single step, though I don’t know whether he said this before or after the infamous “Long March” of 1934. Unfortunately, I'm more likely to treat the beginnings of things as if I were Zeno, seeing every segment of that thousand-mile journey as consisting of an infinite number of first steps, preventing me from ever reaching my goal. Lately, I’m inclined to hitch my wagon to Heraclitus (it's a small wagon) and treat the whole project as a process that doesn't necessarily have a beginning, ending or middle -- just a gradual change captured as snapshots that will find themselves posted on this blog. So what's the project?

BABBLE/ON IS A CITY

The short answer is that I'm going to design a city. For now, it will be created entirely on a computer using CAD software that allows for 3D modeling of buildings and landscapes. There will be residences, municipal buildings, office towers, power plants, public parks and monuments, museums, transit hubs and just about anything else that you can find in a city. Parts of the city will be boring or purely functional while other parts will be fanciful and weird. I will design some things to be as realistic as possible and others that would be physically impossible to build. Sections of the city will be an obvious homage to a certain style or a near-exact replica of an actual place, but there will be other places that will look like something out of a space opera. The city will be absolutely everything and anything I can dream up.

BABBLE/ON IS A PERSONAL PROJECT

The reason I’m designing such an eclectic city is because I want to teach myself how to draft in 3D, with the aim of pulling off a big career change. I’m not sure if I’ll be going into architecture, urban planning, industrial design or engineering, but I know that I enjoy computer drafting and I like the idea of helping to design things that will be useful to people. I’ll explore my background and motivations in a future post, but suffice it to say that I would enjoy creating things for a living.

I’m hoping that in creating this city, I will learn how to draft in 3D using CAD software, be able to explore and internalize basic design concepts, get a feel for the basics of urban planning and have a regular creative outlet that syncs up with my career goals.

BABBLE/ON IS A WEBLOG

After I came up with the idea of building a virtual city to teach myself how to draft in 3D, it occurred to me that it would also be a pretty good blog idea. A blog is something like being a published writer and also a little like being a radio dj, both of which I’ve enjoyed doing before, so the idea has a lot of appeal to me. I tried my hand at it with a music-themed blog that never really held my attention. Since that died a lingering death, I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a blog idea that I could really get into, and I think I’ve found it.

On these virtual pages you’ll see the city of Babble/On as it begins – slowly – to develop, and at the same time you’ll hopefully see my drafting skills improve. Perhaps any savvy creative types out there will be able to see an increasing sophistication in my design sensibilities, although I’m far less optimistic about this. There will also be some occasional tech-talk about the computers and software that I’ll be using, with the inevitable glitches and support issues that come up, although I’ll try to keep this to a bare minimum.

I hope that having such a public forum will keep me honest about working regularly on the project and help me to clarify my thinking as I go. I also hope that I’ll get some regular readers that can help to critique my plans, give me hardware/software tips and join me in a general dialogue about the world of design and my project. If I get to a point where people think that I’ve learned things that they want to know, I’ll be happy to share.

THE RECTIFICATION OF NAMES

Confucius was really big about calling things by their proper name, and I must admit to a certain obsession in that regard as well, though not in the way he was talking about. “Babble/On” is of course a pun on the ancient city “Babylon” and my tendency to “babble on” and on about whatever happens to be floating my boat. So caveat emptor: I like puns. I also live in New York, a city which is frequently compared to the famously wicked Babylon because of all the fun depravity and excellent rocking out to be found here.

Also, for the time being I will be keeping this blog anonymous because I work in a design office and may occasionally discuss work situations if they pertain to some aspect of the design and construction world that comes up on the blog. I have taken the nom de blogue “Arazu” because he was a Babylonian god of completed construction. I realize that this might be a bit too Dungeons & Dragonsey for some, but it’s better than calling myself Marduk or Gilgamesh.

Finally, in the spirit of beginnings, I'll attach a screenshot of the second 3D project I did (about two weeks ago), a simple rendering of a bench that I did for a construction project at work. I had a side elevation to work with on computer, so I just went into the field and took the remaining measurements, whipped it up in CAD and did a quickie fill. Enjoy.