Historiarum

I’m not sure I bit off more than I can chew in choosing to rebuild Griffith Stadium, but it’s certainly very close. SketchUp has proved to be one of those pieces of software you can really immerse yourself in; as in, “Wow! It’s 4am and I can’t feel my legs-I better go to bed!” Once I had the more rudimentary tasks down I became more and more frustrated by the limitations of the basic shapes. Especially since my building was filled with odd shapes and junctions. At times it became a fairly tedious process of trying to make point A line up with point B without affecting points C and D. For example the support beams I built to hold up the bleachers and roof proved extremely difficult to properly align, and I am certain that in the real world my building would topple over quickly.

However, any time you get to spend with your source material is time well spent, and working these photos and maps over in an effort to build the model really proved revealing. For example, I anticipated being able to get a feel for how it would have looked to sit in the seats at Griffith Stadium, and develop the sense of intimacy that old parks were known for. But I also came to understand that the sight lines one had beyond the stadium were also different than what we have grown accustomed to. Namely, it became possible to see the surrounding area, giving a sense that the park was part of the neighborhood. This makes sense when one thinks how these parks were generally built in more central locations rather than on the far edges of town.

Overall, despite the immense amounts of time SketchUp required to produce a viable model, I found it particularly rewarding. The results, along with some of the source images are below:

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 2:38 pm and is filed under 697. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.