Babel IID

This is one of three projects I practically worked with when the Ideal spaces working group exhibited together for the first time in 2016, Ideal Spaces Exhibition, made for the Venice Biennale 2016 during a period for almost 18 months. The ideal spaces group worked with seven different utopian buildings/cities. It was not planned in any way that I would do any modeling for this project, but one of the younger architects in the project was not able to finish Paulo Soleros Babel IID. Old school as I am I decided to do a low poly version based on the initial modeling and limited reference image I had access to. I was initially a bit rusty in my craft and Softimage had just been discontinued and I had not had time to learn any new software. Using the measurements from the original. Below is the final model only 7MB when exported out from Softimage to FBX. Scale wise it was a huge world, what I learned through all my 3d projects is that real-world measurements can be a pain for many rendering applications. So working in a smaller scale is preferable, reducing rendering time, etc. It took about 2 days to model, most time searching for reference images online and in books. Later in 2018 I got myself a copy of the original Paulo Solero book Arcology: City in the Image of Man there I finally found some good reference images, but then the project was already ended. For those interested in reading about the original Babel IID project here is a link

In the two worlds I worked on in this project I focused on the human proportions and the bodily movements in these two environments. Inspired by Umberto Eco`s work with the name of the rose and something he discusses in Post scriptum to the name of the Rose, that he wanted to create a dialog that actually could be a dialogue in real space, he clocked the walks between different end and start point in the monastery, using real-world constraints creating the dialogue between the different characters in the book. So I also tried to clock the movement moving inside of both BAbel IID and Leonardo’s Milano. Architectural visualizations are a form of storytelling and should at their best help us through the way the space is represented and give us valuable insights about how it could be living and working in such an environment. At the same time, it implicitly says something under which values, rules, and conditions it was created. There has been a lot of development and improvement in architectural visualization technologies. But still there is a gap between the visualizations and the final appearance. Part of our work is to allow viewers to better understand the spatial concept and its architectural experience. I am not interested to produce photoreal visuals, lens effects, and splendid views from above not considered and designed from the perspective of an actual dweller.

An image from the set-up of the video wall, called the cave since it was 120 degree projection surface divided into three parts. We wrote about this from a design and audience perspective for the ArtsIt 2018 conference I Braga Portugal called Worldmaking: designing for audience participation, immersion and interaction in virtual and real spaces, it can be found here.