Rhett Carlin ATCM 3355 F23: Project 1 Castle - Tower

Concept:  The concept I decided to base my castle/tower was of a colosseum-esc city ruined by time and rebuilt over and over. The base design was simple enough, however I wanted an aspect of it to stand out as the focal point which would provide a good introduction to rhino while posing a challenge to better my use of the program. I am lucky enough to have visited the roman colosseum and a large proportion of its history is intertwined with a cultural hierarchy of class. The Spire in the center of my tower is intended to demonstrate a story of class conflict where those in higher echelons increasingly distance themselves from the lower classes until eventually the only way to continue creating distance was to move upwards, physically putting themselves above the common folk.

Processes: The tower began as a number of concentric circles emanating out from the origin divided into 12 sections. I began building the actual structure by extruding a single outside curve Boolean tower, and creating a polar array of the geometry around the circle creating the outside wall. These pillars were then adjusted randomly to mimic the idea of a skyline, and then merged into one piece of geometry. An oblong cylinder turned to its side, polar arrayed, and Boolean differenced 24 times along the base created entranceways to the outside. From here I created a cone with its point pointed in the origin and Boolean differenced the sides of the outside wall to create a framing, and draw the viewers eye towards the middle of the model. The secondary walls built higher followed the same process. The spire in the middle of the model is a sculpted truncated cone with half a sphere placed atop. The colosseum itself was then duplicated, scaled, and transformed to sit atop the sphere. small detail elements were then added to create more character.

Materials: The materials I used to cover the tower was the preset plastic material. I wanted the structure to exude the idea of a clean marble while also looking inauthentic. Plastic often falls into this world of the uncanny valley where its perfect, but strangely, not perfect enough. It feels fake and the over consumption and waste of plastic in our own lives helps demonstrate an idea of materialistic culture being present.