non places in Stoke on Trent

Stoke is a place I travel through on the way to North Wales.  It has its own charm.  It’s well looked after, it has parks that are built with all ages in mind.  It has a great Asian Supermarket that I’ve visited several times now.  More importantly it has some great road structures along the A50.  There’s a tunnel and a section where the road appears to be etched into the landscape.  It feels like your in a slot race as you traverse through the deep channel.

Both zones are pedestrian free which is interesting as the tunnel has breakdown telephone boxes and both zones have pedestrian footpaths.  There purpose is obviously for emergencies but in both cases there are footpaths that eventually link to a standard open footpath.  I wonder about the illegality of using these footpaths albeit for taking photographs?

Im going to use these images as reference points when modelling the underpass structure in my 3d Model.

Development: Surrounding context

This evening I have adjusted the proportions of the building and reduced the larger blocks to a more balanced size.  I am also beginning to construct the surroundings.

Latest with AO – although that will need adjusting too before its finished.

I’ve raised the building from the ground because I have begun to find bridges interesting to the point where I no longer want to be “the driver” on journeys anymore.  Taking shots would be much more to my liking.  Le Corbusier liked to raise buildings into the air, probably to increase the separation between place and the rest of the world.  I need to find a good illustrated book about Le Corbusier.

Current work

My interest in the architectural style of Brutalism has finally crossed swords with 3Ds Max and this is the current position.

There’s lots I need to do, not least to find a few more reference points to draw from for the style.  I’m happy with the windows and the edging on their levels it came out just like the image I was referring to.  Technically I have using the Vray sun lighting solution with clouds for additional effect.  The Vray sun took a lot of setting up, but the following settings seem to create lighting comparable to the Mental Ray Sun system:

Invisible Disk Ticked
Turbidity 2.0
Ozone 0.4
Intensity Multiplier 0.015
Size Multiplier 1.0 (leave as default as the sun disk is invisible – see first setting)
Shadow Subdivision: 3 to 64 (depending on desired quality vs render speed 3 is fast)
Shadow bias: 0.5cm
Photon Emit Radius: 26.67cm

Pretty precise, but the results are good.  I’m going to blog what each of these do at a later date, at this point it’s just nice to be able to use the feature.

Mass Identity Architecture

I’m not sure why, but during the stresses of my MA I couldn’t read this book for long before it gave me a headache.  However, now that I have some oxygen I am realising the relevences that are being drawn by the late Jean Baudrillard between architecture and society.  There is a fantastic chapter called “The Rise Of The Object: The End Of Culture” which is thought provoking enough.  The detailed passages explore normally mundane places like the drugstore and how it’s an archetypal representation of the consumer society.  I have yet to read it thoroughly, but I find that I am always hit in the face by Baudrillards descriptive poetics that are a pleasure to read.  I am also reading his book “America” on and off and this too stops you in your tracks on a regular basis as you consider and digest the mind-bomb that you have been handed.

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A decade or so ago I might not have given books such high approval.  Since deciding to withdraw myself from the comma inducing Television by actually choosing to disconnect from this particular service of media distribution I’ve realised the level to which TV viewers are being dumbed down (for want of a nicer phrase).  It seems that even the method of presentation of programmes like the Money Programme and Panorama are often biased, badly researched and worst of all inconclusive.  I found myself questioning the narrator pointing out the biased points and asking the TV “what about x and y”.  (Don’t even start me off on the format of Question Time!)

New Books

I have purchased some new books for inspiration.  I can wholeheartedly recommend Forbidden Places by Sylvain Margaine.  The imagery inside is superb.  Carefully taken shots of disused places displaying fragments of their history and offering us narratives from the past of a “better” time.  In this context “better” is somewhat subjective as the places include Sanitariums, Mental Hospitals, old Theaters and Industrial Complexes.  Once I pick this book up I find it difficult to put down even though I have read most of the text and viewed every page several times now.

The second book, Concepts Of Space In Traditional Indian Architecture is a study of the way that sacred Indian Architecture is arranged.  This is interesting from a spiritual point of view but more importantly the illustrations show that the temples or Mandirs are often very high and go very deep into the ground.  I think that they are a feat of engineering and incredibly beautiful to look at.  The old spaces that are discussed in the book appear to have lots of clever uses of light and have many nooks that seem to store darkness in comparison to the sometimes dramatic shafts of light that can be seen.  I think that modelling one of these places, even in block form would be an interesting task.  But would be a great way to explore the use of light.

Architecture is effectively a text book for anyone dealing with buildings and their surrounding spaces.  There are many good illustrations and the main feature for me is the Architects Glossary and the excellent layout of the book that teaches you so so much.  I flicked through this a couple of times whilst at Uni, but didn’t take it out because it’s a big book and I tended to already have a bag full.  Now that I own a copy I realise how useful and relevant this was to my study.  The paper I wrote that includes a section about personal space is clearly explained in this book – it was nice to have my choice to include this in my work confirmed by a (somewhat acclaimed) academic.

Links:

Forbidden Places : http://www.amazon.co.uk/FORBIDDEN-PLACES-Exploring-abandoned-heritage/dp/2915807825/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305664484&sr=1-1

Concepts Of Space In Traditional Indian Architecture : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Concept-Space-Traditional-Indian-Architecture/dp/1890206628/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1305664576&sr=1-1

Architecture – Form, Space & Order : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Architecture-Francis-D-K-Ching/dp/0471752169/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1305664650&sr=1-1

Lomography Gallery

I have just posted a new gallery page (see link above) that contains all the random shots that were taken on 14th March 2011.   “36 exposures” have been chosen to try and capture the personality of those present.  Some of the shots are just using the shapes and spaces that most now take for granted in the building.

The images are meant to show the results of using a Lomo LC-A camera.  Whilst too expensive for me at the moment, the free Photoshop actions simulate the likely results.  Frankly, even if the actions aren’t representative the collection is interesting to look at anyhow and makes for a great set of images.

Thanks to everyone who was photographed / took photographs.  If you want credit just drop me a comment

Planning for randomness

OK, I’ve got a plan.  Take the tiny Olympus Micro out with me tomorrow and snap interesting shapes and forms that I can find on the way to work and back and maybe even at work too.  Results may vary.  I’ll probably waver off onto urban street furniture.

Still, I have a plan.  Which is better than most recent Sunday evenings.

Lomography

I’ve found a great little camera called a Lomo LC-A+ (Lomo Compact Automatic).  It uses the apparently legendary Minolta 1 lens to produce quirky results which typically include the following characteristics:

Incorrect exposure
Over exposed colours
Light leakage due to the poor construction of the camera itself (a feature?)
Happy Accidents (!)
Vignetting

Surrounding this structured chaos is a subculture called Lomography, it’s interesting, especially the history of the camera and how it was basically saved from disappearing completely after the capitalisation of the Soviet Union.

I would like to be able to afford to buy one of these cameras, but I can’t at the moment (ironic considering it’s history).  However, I soon realised that the effects caused by the camera could easily be recreated using photoshop/gimp etc without too much difficulty.  To get started fast I grabbed a copy of some photoshop actions like these.

These are my first batch of 24 exposures!

When occupational cues tell you no one is home.

01/01/2011,Flickr User: Veeter1971 – “Trashed Office”, http://www.flickr.com/photos/45756249@N05/4271472841/in/photostream/

This space is so full of occupational cues.  Its a screaming dichotomy of presence and absence.  It must have been fantastic to find this room like this.

Mental Ray vs Vray

I found out how to convert Mental Ray materials to Vray (almost) automatically today.  So I decided to open up the Shanty scene from my MA which was rendered with Mental Ray and see what it looked like through Vray.  Here are the results.

After the automatic conversion of most of the materials I had to deal with the misplaced opacity maps that the converter placed in the Reflection slot for some reason.  I only needed to do this for the occupancy planes and the surrounding background buildings so it didn’t take long.

Prior to any adjustments in PS.

Looking at these together, the original vray HDRI render looks better than the one adjusted in PS.  Photoshop is good, but it’s so easy to mess a scene up with it!