Building #2. Phase Five.

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Here's what the building looked like at the end of Phase Four:

At the end of Phase Four there was an arcade around the perimeter of the entire building that enclosed one large courtyard which was crisscrossed by two elevated walkways. I had just bought a large set of American Plastic Bricks on Ebay and I had a lot of building materials to work with, so I decided to build another walkway above the perimeter arcade at the fourth floor level that would enclose three sides of the large courtyard. I also decided that I'd build two giant staircases up to this fourth floor walkway. I got this far,  

building most of the elevated walkway but just one of the two giant staircases,

but despite my recent purchase, I ran out of bricks: 

It was an interesting idea and probably would have looked good when completed, but it was an 'evolutionary trend' that wasn't 'selected'. It was just too costly to the 'organism'. I decided to remove the one giant staircase that was finished and focus on the fourth floor perimeter walkway instead.  The towers that supported the walkway now rose two stories above it, and letting the building grow taller was starting to look more interesting than letting it grow wider.

Building #2. Phase Four.

THIS BLOG IS BEST READ CHRONOLOGICALLY. 

IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST VISIT, 

PLEASE CONSIDER SCROLLING ALL THE WAY DOWN TO THE EARLIEST ENTRY.

Here's what the building looked like at the end of Phase Three:

The building looked a bit disjointed at the end of Phase Three, like two separate structures; a bridge connected to a cloister. But a way to unify the building soon became apparent. I added two more arcades and created a new courtyard between the bridge and the cloister: 

You can see in the picture below that I was once again running out of bricks, but the lack of choice in materials can lead to new ideas. I had run out of the long white lintels that I use to make the roofs on the arcades. I was forced to find a new way to build the arcade that ran down the middle of the front courtyard. If you look back at Phase Three you'll see that I dismantled the existing central arcade to get the white lintels for the new side arcades. Then I found a way to rebuild the central arcade using red bricks to form corbelled arches:

  

At this point I also added a pavilion or aedicula on top of the corbelled arch bridge that already spanned the back courtyard:

A walkway raised a story off the ground on corbelled arches now ran down the center of the entire building. It looked so good that it quickly led to another improvement. I dismantled the existing arcade made with long white lintels that separated the front courtyard from the back courtyard, and replaced it with another walkway raised on corbelled arches. This completely changed the way the building is perceived. At the beginning of Phase Four there were two courtyards, the original courtyard at the back of the building and the new one at the front. Now it is more likely that a casual observer will see one courtyard divided into four quadrants by a cross shaped elevated walkway:

What intrigues me the most about the process of accretion and evolution demonstrated here so far, is that the results have already gone way beyond any intention that I had when I built the cloister in Phase One. This tells me that a process of evolution and change is as viable in architecture as it is in life. Buildings in Europe have benefitted from just such a process of change over time, but here in the United States we reject the idea of evolution in a building and even create laws that make it illegal to add to historical buildings in a seamlessly evolving way. 

I've become interested in finding out just how much I can add to this building before I reach a point where further evolution and accretion do more to ruin its appearance than to improve it. The question I'm posing is actually a three dimensional version of the two dimensional game that students of Colin Rowe would play when I was in architecture school. We'd draw a simple plan with felt tipped pen on a napkin. The napkin would get passed along, each student adding to the plan, the order and richness of the design evolving endlessly. Here's an example from the early days of the game when Colin Rowe and his colleagues at the University of Texas used fragments of famous buildings as building blocks for their endlessly evolving plans:

Building #2. Phase Three.

THIS BLOG IS BEST READ CHRONOLOGICALLY.  

IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST VISIT,

 PLEASE CONSIDER SCROLLING ALL THE WAY DOWN TO THE EARLIEST ENTRY.

Here's what the building looked like at the end of Phase Two:

The row of little structures sitting on top of the entrance pavilion had become a sort of American Plastic Bricks version of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy:

As a child I had always loved building the bridge that was illustrated in the older American Plastic Bricks instruction booklet.  So with the Ponte Vecchio in mind I decided to insert aspects of that bridge into this building.

The results produced a new version of the building.  A version that still seemed to possess a certain amount of integrity.  

The row of little structures on the bridge were moved around to accommodate a new walkway across the upper level of the bridge. The long arcade that had connected the entry pavilion back to the original entrance was roofed over to continue the upper level walkway back to the courtyard.

And another bridge was added that arched over the courtyard to the very back of the building.

The patterns made by the repetition of the smaller structures were now both clearer and at the same time more complex.

Building #2. Phase Two.

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Here's what the building looked like at the end of Phase One:  

Still having plenty of bricks to work with, I decided to look for an opportunity to continue building.  I had created a single entry point where you could enter between columns into the central courtyard.

That entry point was a good place to add on so I tried different possibilities for an entry pavilion linked to the courtyard by a long arcade. 

 

The entry pavilion and the arcade kept getting bigger.  I soon realized that the buildings on the roof of the entry pavilion could be repetitions of the existing buildings that surrounded the courtyard. This provided many new opportunities for creating pattern. 

Those patterns may be a bit hard to find in the pictures above, but they show up a lot more clearly in the three pictures below where the building is viewed along its bilateral axis.