Micropolis Monday: Masonry Walk-Ups

As much as I love modern architecture, I adore the layers of history in a city. I like the way that you can read the eras and the changing character through the buildings. There is a atmosphere in that history that has to be accrued through experience.

That is a lot of pretentious talk to justify my love of quirky, old buildings. Sometimes I find myself enamoured with ugly buildings too, especially eccentric oddities.

This week I designed a trio of smaller buildings, squeezing them onto a single module.

front

I like how this weird little trio came together. The central building has a good mass to it, with a square footprint and a muted palette. To balance that, I added some smaller buildings with more color and implied character.

back

Around the back, we get to see the larger walls of solid masonry. I really like to add accent colors to when I plate-build as I feel that it creates a visual texture that mimics the physical texture that is hard to capture in this scale.

I also tucked a tree into the courtyard space behind the buildings, because I am always trying to find ways to squeeze more trees into my city.

plan

Each of the three buildings has a different footprint and a slightly different roof. The fact that the white building goes all the way to the edge of the module could limit its placement, but I’m not too worried about that.

As usual, I designed the model on my Twitch stream last Friday and posted the process to YouTube.

This week I only made a couple of small edits afterward, moving a window and adding the tree.

Next week will probably be more of the same, as I work on completing a block of these quirky little buildings.

Keep building and enjoy!