Santiago Perez-Isaza: Week 1 Castle

 

Concept:

    When this project was assigned, I knew I wanted to do a castle that combined the brutalist style of architecture with the stereotypical castle look. I knew I wanted to steer in the direction of a cathedral and fortress look, with some sci-fi elements. The overall mood I wanted to achieve was like a fortress protecting a portal to another dimension. I based a lot of the details from existing buildings from the 60's and 70's of Socialist eastern Europe. 

Process:

    Finding inspiration wasn't a challenge since this has been something I've wanted to attempt for awhile. Instagram was my go to resource, since there was plenty of architecture pages to look at. 

    At first it was a challenge remembering the names of the commands in Rhino. My project required a lot of lofting and edge surface commands. It was very intuitive to draw the basic shapes of the design then connecting everything together with those commands. After a few hours I got into a rhythm of forming, lofting, and cutting.

    The front wooden face of the building was the most challenging because instead of creating separate shapes then combining them, I made one block and started to cut out the specific shapes. This way I had more control if I wanted to change any angles in the front instead of having to go back and rebuild the shape. It was here that I realized my project was going more in the direction of a cathedral shape rather than a large fortress. 

    I actually started the project with the walls and a couple of other "sketches" for the building. I found this design for the wall pillars from an old diving board that had a similar shape. I really liked the way it moved visually and it fit the overall theme of the project. I wanted to create these tall stone pillars with metal walls although the texturing for that didn't come out the way I expected.

    The portal in the background was a last minute addition because I wanted to add some story to the building, to give it a purpose. I was surprised to see that Keyshot had this neat texture that looked like it could be a portal. With some fine adjustments to the roughness and size of the texture, I was able to get a convincing effect.

    For the material renderings in Keyshot, I wanted to stick to stone materials and a minimal amount of wood. When texturing the project, I was thinking about the Norwegian architects that mix concrete and wood to create an interesting mixture of the two. So I attempted that style and in my opinion it could've been done better. In the future when we use keyshot again, I hope to be able to make each material my own and make it look exactly the way I envision it.