Building #2. Phase Four.

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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: