St. Vincent Greenwich Village Demo

Twenty some years ago I had an idea for an Italian Romanesque tower for a site in Greenwich Village.  I lost much of the back up material, but I found some slides I took while rendering the perspective.  The following is a sequence of images showing the process.  I know, it is like showing how to make buggy whips now that everyone uses Photoshop, but you might find it interesting.

Here is the wireframe... talk about archaic.  But it was a big step up from hand layouts.

I sketched over the wireframe with pencil, then pasted context buildings in, and added trees, background context and a wet street with cars.

Now, on a mylar overlay, I rendered the image in ink with Rapidograph (technical) pen.

Once I had an ink drawing, it was party time!  I had it photo-reduced to an 8"x10" size, and I xeroxed the thing.  Using pastels I worked up a number of possible color schemes.  My default is a warm/cool balance that helps make the building pop out, but I'll do 8 or 10 variations if I have the time.  It is a quick process, and you get immediate gratification.  What's not to like.


The following are photos of the board while I'm proceeding to airbrush the final.

 I used a Paasche type "V", with a good compressor without a tank. 

To allow the ink lines to show, I used Pelikan drawing ink A, which was fairly transparent.

I tried to keep the airbrushing limited to large areas, so the ink would carry the detailing.  If I felt the need for some texture, I erased back the ink by hand, or by electric eraser.  This worked best with the blue range of inks, but not with some of the others due to strong staining.

Here is the final, shown with the original color sketch.


Now... the punch line here is that I gave this rendering to my sister-in-law, but I lost the print I made of it...so
I can't show you a good final.

However, I liked the ink drawing so well that I later did a different color rendering on the same ink drawing.

This time I tried a red/green scheme.  This is the color sketch.

And... here is the final that I have in the house.  I've stored it away now, since the reds were beginning to fade, but it is still a favorite of mine.

Why Blog?

Having lived through the computer revolution and felt its impact on architecture, I thought I should post my thoughts on the subject.  Modeling a design, and rendering that model has become so cheap and easy that nearly any architect can do it.  Making a rendering stand out from the crowd however, is not so easy.  This blog will point out ways to get a design noticed, and built.  And getting your work built has always been the goal for architects.

I expect to comment on architecture in general, also history, art and anything that catches my eye.  Also, anything I might be working on at the time.  I'm not a writer, but rather an architect/artist, so expect more pretty pictures than words.  Unless otherwise noted any drawing or painting is my own (it is my blog after all).

Welcome