Construction Begins

I was a fan of Google Earth since before my computer could handle running it. I used it for as many things as I could think of, including figuring how far down the street the Titanic would reach if it were parked at my kid's elementary school, calculating the height of fireworks using the measurement of time between the flash and the boom to get the hypotenuse of a triangle formed by their explosion point, our position and the launch site, and accurately placing grains of salt into accurately spaced orbit shells in my daughter's scale model of a gold atom.

In 2007, I read about some software that people could use to make little replicas of buildings to populate this digital world. I downloaded it, I tried it, I made a little model of my house that I accidentally scaled to be 500 feet tall. Well, that was fun.

I hovered my cursor over the uninstall button, but then I thought, "you know, the Morgan Building is just a big rectangle. It would probably be pretty easy to...", and then it was 2009.


Sketchup, acquired by Google in 2006, is very intuitive design software that can be used by rank amateurs for any number of design purposes. Professionals use it as a sort of informal sketch pad to noodle with an idea before committing it to CAD. Middle school kids use it in the classroom to learn the rudiments of design.  And sometimes middle-aged men use it, get hopelessly confused, swear at it, and come to terms with it slowly and with enormous difficulty.



My first approach was to use the photo matching utility to get the basic geometry down.  It's a process where you arrange three dimensional shapes so that a photograph becomes, essentially, a projected image that skins the surfaces you've created.  The results?  In this case, underwhelming.

You can't really do an accurate reproduction using a photograph that has been cropped. I don't know why.  All the lines look straight, but there must be some subtle curvature in the image that the software is compensating for.

Photogrammetry has a lot of applications, though.  It wasn't all wasted effort, though.  I found some discontinued software from 1998 that let me make this.

I was still considering this to be a simple Google Earth model when I realized that it would actually be easier (at least at this stage) if I worked toward replicating the building as it existed a hundred years ago.  For one thing, the Central Avenue side of the building is comprised of seven identical sections.  I could just the geometry right once, and then copy and paste it.   And secondly, who wanted to spend that much time looking at the building as it currently exists?   I live in the same town as this thing.  There's a stop light in front of it.  I can stare at it all I want.

So, I set to work recreating the arches and insets of the building's street-facing sides. It went slowly, but it was the kind of project you start with the reality in the back of your head that you might never really finish it. There was a lot of experimenting, and controlling the tools became intuitive. The thing that changed for me during this process was the way I experienced architecture. 

For one thing... I started experiencing architecture.

You look at a building... it's walls and windows and there's probably a roof. Good job. You're keeping out a lot of rain and wind.

But when you take something apart and put it back together a few dozen times, it's impossible not to notice that there are themes and motifs that reoccur with variations.  That thing that people say about architecture being frozen music, I never got that before.

(Johan Wolfgan von Goethe said that.  I'd thought it was Elvis Costello, who said that 'writing about music is like dancing about architecture' in a magazine I read in 1983.  Although, the sentiment didn't originate with him.  But this is someone else's rabbit hole.)

After a few months, I thought it would be a hoot to fill in the interior of the building with as much as I could remember from my years as a resident there. I was just curious about what that process would be like. I didn't anticipate getting very far with it.

The outside of the building gave a lot of clues about the interior.   I figured the interior spaces would be a certain number of segments long and a certain number of segments deep.

I remembered the stairs clearly, there were 60 of them when I lived there.  A flight of 26, a flight of 12, a flight of 14, then 3, then 5.  You don't forget a thing like that after four years of carrying groceries up from the car.

The top five stairs, I think, were only added when the place was converted into apartments.  They don't appear in the model.

The thing about modeling the place circa 1911 is that you give up some interesting features. The arched windows that looked out over pike street in the early years were boarded over in the 1902 renovation. The was also a large, east-facing window at the dry goods store that was walled over by 1905. I haven't abandoned that window yet in the model. It's very cool.

The west face of the building was a problem. I took a lot of really riveting, breath-stealing, heart stopping pictures. They all look like this.

According to the maintenance guy who worked for my landlord, the building was painted white at some point after 1911.

So, now it's pink.  It's pink forever.  But, the bricks used to seal the original windows sucked in the paint differently that the original bricks.  So, the task really boils down to discerning bricks that were 120 years old from bricks that were merely 100 years old.

Some guys fish, you know.  Some guys build ships in bottles.  But this, for some reason is the thing that I have chosen for myself

After some time, I'd done everything I could with the information I had.  This is always a troublesome time for me: when I have to shift a quiet little personal project into something I bother other people with.

It's a daunting thing to reach out to a stranger beneath the thematic statement of , "Hi. I'm moderately weird, and I have some questions."

But, that's what I did.


Opera House Month continues next week.