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.

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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.

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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.

Building #2. Phase One.

One of the charms of American Plastic Bricks is that the buildings described in the instruction books are so reminiscent of their time. The earlier instruction book showed buildings that were typical in America during the 1940's and 1950's.  The later instruction book (two pages are shown below) had buildings with a 1960's look.

But both children and architects want to move beyond the examples in the instruction books, and American Plastic Bricks made that very easy to do.  The pieces simulate red bricks and white concrete lintels (beams). You can do almost anything with this building toy that you might choose to do with real bricks and beams.

In building #2, which I started in the summer of 2008, I decided I wanted to build something with a courtyard.  A sort of cloister, where the central open court is surrounded by a roofed arcade which in turn is surrounded by a repeating set of small buildings.  I made the whole composition bilaterally symmetrical; the left matching the right but the front and back different.  I imagined some sort of entry gate at the front and taller towers at the back. I was building on a glass topped table so these first pictures might be a bit confusing. Here it is before it was finished, viewed from the front:

     

And here it is viewed from the back:

As the towers grew in height it started to look pretty good.  The repetition of elements created nice patterns.  There were going to be two broad based towers in the back, four narrow towers with one at each corner of the arcade, seven stepped buildings with peaked roofs around the outside of the arcade, etc.  

All life has evolved around the need for recognizing pattern but the human mind is particularly adept at it.  It loves finding and recognizing pattern, even when it's not conscious of the source of its pleasure.

In my previous entry in this blog I mentioned that I would be talking about evolution and accretion as architectural concepts.  A moment of evolution occurred next, a sort of random mutation. I realized that the bilateral symmetry that I was creating along the long axis of this building could occur just as easily along the short axis, and that I could try out this whole new version of symmetry by simply removing one broad based tower and sliding it to its opposite corner:

I tried it and it looked much better.  The random mutation was 'selected':

  

It was clear that the last minute shift from symmetry along the long axis to symmetry along the short access made the building look better, but why.  What does better mean in this case when only form and space are the issue and there is no problem for the building to solve? 

In both versions repetitive elements were placed symmetrically, but in the earlier version they were simply lined up in pairs; two of these, then two of these, then two of these.  In the later version the symmetrical pairs are far apart.  Other symmetrical pairings happen in between them.  The pattern making has become more complex and I think the human mind enjoys recognizing more complex patterns. 

This evolution towards more complex pattern making is even apparent in the history of architecture.  If you look at the ancient Temple of Luxor in Egypt it has the same kind of long axis with a series of symmetrical pairs that appeared in my first version of Building #2:

While much later, Blenheim Palace in Britain is all about short axis symmetry and the separation of symmetrical pairs with lots of other symmetrical events in between:  

Building #1.

Here's a good place to start.  I built this in 2004 just as I started to acquire a few more American Plastic Bricks sets on Ebay to add to my childhood collection.  This building started out as the "American Village Municipal Building" illustrated on page 13 of the "How to Build with American Plastic Bricks" instruction booklet:

but I still had bricks left over when it was finished so I 'extruded' (a bad word in the real world of architecture today) the building and it turned into this:

Note the construction detail below that allowed for a wider band of casement windows with no interruption for supporting walls:

The evolution of this building from the one illustrated in the instruction booklet to the one pictured here happened in several stages. I'd describe those stages as a process of both evolution and accretion.  More about that later. 

Who's Buying American Plastic Bricks & What Are They Building With Them?

I still have my American Plastic Bricks from childhood.  A few years ago, when I started teaching architecture at the college level, I decided to put my old APB building sets out where my students could play with them in their spare time and hopefully develop their 2D to 3D visualization skills. I soon realized I needed more bricks and was pleased to find them available on Ebay. I wasn't surprised at the many sets that were for sale. I knew how popular the toys once were and how long they were on the market. What surprised me was the high prices that buyers were occasionally willing to pay.

I've started this blog because I suspect that there are a lot of architects, frustrated architects, and eternal children out there who are from my generation and who are starting to reach retirement age. I suspect it is you that I'm bidding against on Ebay. That like me, you are buying your favorite toy from childhood and building things. I'm curious to see what you are building and I'd like this blog to be a place where we can share pictures of our creations.  Please send your pictures to:        kenvineberg@hotmail.com 

Building Toys And Architects.

When I was an architecture student in the late 1960's my fellow students and I realized that almost all of us had played with some sort of building toy as children.  For many of us it was American Plastic Bricks, though wooden blocks, Erector Sets, Lincoln Logs, and Tinker Toys were all equally high on the list.  Many of us had spent time playing with every one of these toys.  

Though it seems to be widely known that Frank Lloyd Wright gave a lot of credit for his ability as an architect to his childhood involvement with Froebel Blocks, there seems to be far less acknowledgment that almost all architects from my generation benefited from early exposure to various kinds of building toys.  I'm certain that one of the key skills that develops from playing with these toys is the ability to translate easily back and forth between what is described in two dimensions and what is built in three dimensions.       

All of these building toys came with instruction books filled with two dimensional drawings and photographs which illustrated the objects that could be built in three dimensions. Sometimes these drawings were perspective drawings but just as often they were plans and elevations.  Children looking at these illustrations and then building the objects that are illustrated gain perceptual skills which are hard to develop in any other way.