Three totally unrelated things

While waiting in my car today, I was searching through the android market, hoping I would finally find an app that I would use more than twice.  It turns out, I finally did find one.  If you have an iphone or android, I highly recommend this app called "Buildings".  It not only has thousands of buildings, but it has directions to them, and finds the history of a building near you.  It is really fun to browse, and I can finally spend (or waste if you prefer) my time doing something interesting while avoiding other people.  No more staring and flipping through my app screen to avoid social interactions at receptions and parties.  I will never look like a loser loner to the general public again!

Perhaps that is a nice venture into my next topic, which is only an update on the globe.  The Tudor-esque style on the outside of the globe has been completed....on most of the first floor.  I know the stair columns have to be completed, but I plan on doing that last, once everything is done.

The coloring process has indeed begun, but the only thing that is set in stone so far are the both the column color and the cow hair plaster on the outside of the building (yes...they used cow hair of all things).  The columns are all just one component that is copied and pasted over and over again.  So while creating the first one took awhile to figure out, the rest was just a tedious five minutes of copy, paste, move, rotate.  Repeat.

The second floor construction has begun and all the benches are in, but a lot more work needs to be done, and it will probably take more time than the first floor did.  For starters, I haven't decided how I want to do that railing yet, and creating the "special rooms" for the royals is a whole different post.

Today I went out and bought a pencil sharpener, pencils, a hi-polymer eraser, and sharpie pens to use on my sketchbook.  Hopefully I will have some sketches soon to post up.

Until tomorrow,

Project: The Globe Theater

When I studied abroad in London, I had the fortune of going to the Globe Theater three times.  Twice to see a play (The Comedy of Errors and Antony and Cleopatra), and once to have a behind the scenes look at the theater.  Although the behind the scenes tour was amazing to see, it also killed the sense of magic the Globe Theater has on its own.  While they told us a lot about how they mimicked the construction of the first Globe, they also showed us the high tech features built in and around the theater, which deprives the structure of its identity:  A building that defies time, as ageless as the stories that are told inside of it.

A Midsummer's Night Dream in 1599

For my project, I looked at tons of pictures of the new Globe Theater, the Old Globe Theater (in San Diego), and sketches and ideas of what the first Globe Theater may have looked like.  There is very little evidence or reports of the theater's specifications, so fortunately, a lot of elements were able to be smudged, such as the number of exits, or the height of the stage.

I started a basic globe theater a couple of months ago, but it is very sloppy, and I am restarting it from the ground up, knowing much more about BIM drawing than I did at the outset.  This is what I have for my first Globe:

My original Globe Theater (First Floor Only)

However, I think it is time for a restart, to create a more unified and cleaner Globe, and give it the dues it deserves in a BIM model.  It will also allow me to provide a step by step process on how I came about designing the structure.  

The first thing I did was make a blueprint similar to an A-sheet.  This picture isn't rotated to the traditional x-y axis, but it symmetric nonetheless.  The diameter of this theater is 100', and the stage is 40' x 20'.  I took the following steps to make this layout:

• The outside walls are 1' thick
• The distance from the back of the outside wall to the interior is 15'4".
• The fence of the first floor compartments is 4" thick.
• The exits are in the form of a pentagon, and measure 6' wide, with the remainder of the section used as stairs.
• The center of the circle is the front and middle of the stage.

First Floor Plan (rotated)

Tomorrow I will add the benches to the layout, and add some more details to the floor plan.  Even though it's tempting to drag the whole floor plan up to make it 3D, it is really important NOT TO DO IT.  It will make things MUCH more complicated than they need to be.  Until tomorrow,

Robert.