These are the last two of the ten planned final renderings for my Paradis House project that I made from a Rhino model’s captured viewports, assembled as layers and masks in a composite Photoshop “digital painting/collage.” The second is a “view from the abyss” below the oculus of the building. Please see the perspectival section in this previous post, if that context doesn’t make immediate sense.
This post has a description of the process I use for creating this sort of rendering.
I guess the question I should consider now is whether this method of “digitally painted” illustration (which probably should be considered Non-Photorealistic) has any real compelling rationale versus straight-out Rhino Rendering. It’s just a technique I developed and began to elaborate two decades ago, when even the simplest ray-traced rendering took forever and still looked kind of fake, besides offending the hell out of my architecture school professors who were not computer-literate and didn’t understand the slightest thing about computer-aided design in 3D.
Looks like a lot of work to model your Paradis home. I was wondering about the pilars and floor and so on, what material it is supposed to be?
And about the computer knowledge of your professors, that’s a sad thing. I studied product design +/_35 years ago and one of the questions in our informatics course was: What is a punch card…
Thanks for asking. Keep in mind this is just a fantasy building, and it’s both complex and unlikely. But the idea with the column/walls is that they are composed, at least where they structurally support the engineered lumber roof framing, of post-tensioned pisé, aka rammed earth, probably of necessity mixed with a small amount of Portland cement. (I’ve worked with an architect who specializes in this sort of structure.) Other, non-structural parts of the walls would be adobe, and the whole (adobe and pisé) would be smoothed and plastered with finer muds (mixed with lime for a top coat), as is common with vernacular adobe architecture in the Sahel in Africa as well as parts of southwestern North America. I’m not sure that the finish surface could be made to develop a crackle texture like that, but it was fun to simulate.
Openings in the walls and in the pediments are closed with a simplified form of “wattle”, woven hawthorn and willow branches, which is I guess something one sees most often in an agricultural context in the rural UK. (And a nuisance it was to model in Rhino.) Finally, it occurred to me that I could develop some graffiti textures for the walls and the cast-in-place concrete slab floor/foundation system, based on wild examples of street art that I photographed around abandoned industrial facilities along the East River in Brooklyn about twenty years ago.
I actually think that spiral-framed roof is probably more unlikely than the earth walls…there’s a distinct possibility that it wouldn’t just collapse if someone tried to build it, but that it might begin to rotate while it was collapsing, and that’s why I added some exterior tension cables and masts to help keep it in the air.
And the whole thing is depicted as if it sits over a bottomless shaft, which is just a strange idea that popped into my head while I was rereading The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath one evening. The whole thing just started as a dream, anyway. I don’t find the quotidian architecture projects upon which I sometimes work to be interesting, and this is just my way of coping with that.
