"Hotel End-Times" architecture project, axonometric projection

This is the second in a series of illustrations for my current architectural project, a kind of funerary monument made of “falsework” tube-and-clamp scaffolding. Yes, it’s a rendering from a Rhino model manipulated using Photoshop and Illustrator to appear to be a cheap 70’s paperback novel cover.

I’ve included below the principal rendering embedded in the simulated “cover”, in case you need a clearer view of an imaginary building in axonometric projection, somehow casting a shadow over the front of a humongous skull. I used the curve piping attribute with individual curves to describe the tubes in the structure within the original Rhino model. The big ol’ skull was a mesh asset I’ve had in my archives for years, of uncertain origin, which I painfully positioned in Rhino following some careful subdivision and sculpting in Blender.

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Nice work–digging the darker vibe on this one. It’d be cool to see at least one person for scale. Maybe they are falling into or hanging off the eye socket or facedown in a pool of blood that drips into the eye socket. A few more cinematic shots from different vantage points of your work would be excellent (looking down on the skull from the tower, looking up at your project from the teeth area, etc.). Oh, and something I’ve been doing with students, lately… writing poetry for architecture & design concepts with ChatGPT. This project is ripe for exploring that… lots of potential for cultural commentary, too.

Sidenote: End Times prophets are a pet peeve of mine. They like to talk about this being the End Times (often for control). Then in another breath, they say it’s all in God’s timing (out of our control). Hehe… dream big & live your lives, people!

Thanks for your interest. This project is an update to the concept of dakhma, a sort of monumental structure used (historically in greater Zoroastrian Persia and currently among the Parsis in India, where it is also referred to as a “Tower of Silence”) for excarnation, specifically “air burial”: a process by which the deceased are exposed to the elements and scavenging birds for dispersal and disposal. Similar, but less permanent, scaffolds were built by certain Native American groups for purposes of excarnation, and a designated “charnel ground” (durtro) is still used in some parts of the Himalayan Cultural Region for a related type of ritual. I am in an attempt at a sort of “dark humor” using the phrase “End Times” in an absurdly literal fashion, referring to the general point of funerary customs, as opposed to eschatologically as the term is employed by the (overly) religious in the West.

These concepts and my motivations in creating this design are conceivably distressing to some people, so I mainly concentrate here, which is an online gallery of work created with Rhino, on my use of this software and other programs to create these illustrations. I have two accounts at Instagram, @lewis_wadsworth_iv and @lewis_wadsworth_iv_designs, where (within reason) I would prefer to discuss non-illustration and non-software issues.

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