In the street where you live

I always enjoyed colouring in – a grey-toned 3D Revit rendered image became a colourful display with the help of BeFunky, Snagit Editor and Photoshop.

The real thing

The north view of the building in a busy street. Revit software and Photoshop were responsible for the end result and it was inserted into a photo taken from the area. Sadly my building will never be built, but at least I had the joy of designing it and creating the colour scheme was even more enjoyable.

Maple Building

In my second year of Building Design, we were briefed to design a commercial building that contains four levels, a basement to be a Jazz club, the ground floor containing four shops and rest room facilities, and the next level, an office and the top-level two apartments. A site was given to us in the city centre and luckily it is leveled with no slopes and so we go. I originally designed it with the architectural software AutoCAD and Revit. My inspiration for this design came from the Pixel Building in Melbourne but with a different approach – I chose to use a frame construction method with columns visible outside the building with a red appearance. The red came from the red Maple tree that made my city so beautiful in autumn time and the pixelated sun shading system (the brief required a sun shading system of some kind) that is a multicoloured representation of the autumn season. Its function is to rotate with an electronic system as the sun rotates throughout the day to throw interesting shapes-shadows in the interior of the building.

I captured the original image with the Snagit tool and coloured it in with Snagit functions to represent the image that I had in mind for this building. After that, I insert it into BeFunky to give it an arty look.

Architectural Art

My interest in architecture came from a very young age, where I always wanted to investigate if the exterior of a building correlates with its interior. I also wondered what comes first, do you design a building from the inside out or from outside in. It seems, after I have discussed it with a few building designers and architects, that there is a difference of opinion about it.

While I was doing the Building Design course, I struggled with the same thing. At the end of the course, I realised that, after I designed a few buildings myself,  the interior has a huge say about the exterior in terms of the building’s form. However, the artistic exterior is expressed in terms of colour and its appearance is a choice of artistic flair and complimented by durable materials. Choices are made for the designer by clients, but designers –  because of their knowledge, skills and expertise know what will work for a building or not. The immediate environment, existing buildings in the surrounding area, orientation of the site, climate and the landscape, as well as council decisions and building regulations (zoning, building codes and standards) determines the end result.

So, a building is not just a building, it is a piece of art and someone’s creation – it is a long and thoughtful process of perseverance, dedication, creativity, patience and precision. Is the end product always to everybody’s taste? Not always – but a building, any building does make a statement. It also has to fulfill its duties for the purpose that it was built for. It should be a safe haven for whoever occupies and use it –  it has to be accessible for all kinds of people, and it needs to be a friendly space, otherwise a lot of money, time and effort will be wasted.

All I can say, I love buildings and I enjoy it to converge the original modeled images into digital art.