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An architectural gem remade. |
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A Ready-Made Ruin Bernard Maybeck's "Palace of Fine Arts" was built for effect, for grandeur--but it was never meant to be a permanent structure. Maybeck saw his contribution to the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco as kind of theatrical backdrop, a readymade ruin meant to evoke emotion. Maybeck's fantasy pastiche was a success, evidenced by the fact that the structure still stands (after two restoration efforts). As part of the success story, its romantic plaster and lath shell gave way to the permanence of concrete.
In this
transition, there was something that troubled Maybeck. His Palace's sense of romanticism was compromised by its
cement and steel reality. Even before the decision to save the
building from the wrecking ball, Maybeck had always felt uncomfortable with
the stifling propriety of his Palace having to be a 'real building'.
The atmosphere, the light--it never measured up to the gauzy concept
paintings he had fallen in love with. He wasn't happy with the
earthbound viewpoints of the humans who ambled through the Palace; he wondered what it would look like to a bird. |
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Going Beyond Reality If only, he seemed to wonder, there was a way to share this architecture without it having to leave the romantic world in which is was originally conceived. What, we wondered, would happen if we could extend Maybeck's architecture beyond the boundaries imposed by reality? The result was a short film "Reimagining the Palace", based on Maybeck's drawings and notes. The work was created for the Exploratorium in San Francisco and premiered in the 1998 film program "Celebrating the Palace." It was awarded "Judge's choice at the 1999 SF-AIA.
Technically, the short film required a substantial production effort to deal
with the giant volume of data created for the piece. The entire
structure was captured in 3D by laser scanning. More than 20 scans
were taken of the structure, comprising several million 3D points. After
being converted into .obj files, the
point data was meshed, textured and rendered using
Alias|Wavefront PowerAnimator 8.5. |
 The Palace as it looks today. |
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Architecture, into 3D Working with a prototype laser scanner, Kevin Cain led a group of graduate students in the year-long project to build a 3D model. The well-known San Francisco landmark was scanned by students from the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, led by Jerald Munn and Chris LeGrand. Subsequently, students combined this data with the Palace's original blueprints to create an animated sequence that reflects Maybeck's unrealized design ideas for the building.
During the one day of scanning on site, multiple viewpoints were taken of
the building. This data was translated from raw .XYZ point data into a
polygonal mesh, shown at right. |
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Breaking Down the Results Below, another view of the polygonal mesh for the ceiling. The polygonal wire frame data (at left) is shown along side the textured final output (at right). |
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Extrapoliated NURBS
Curves Where needed, point data was used as a template for traditional NURBS modeling. Below, at left, a NURBS model of the column capitals was built using 3D scan data as a reference. The textured view, below at right, shows the NURBS model with surface attributes and lighting. |
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