Tag: visual

LEGO Architecture: The Visual Guide

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Created in close collaboration with The LEGO Group and Adam Reed Tucker, LEGO® Architecture visionary, LEGO Architecture: The Visual Guide takes a deep look at the artists, builders, and inspiration behind the LEGO Architecture series. Beautifully illustrated and annotated, this visual guide allows you to explore the LEGO team’s creative process in building and understand how LEGO artists translated such iconic buildings into these buildable LEGO sets. Stunning images and in-depth exploration of the real buildings like the Guggenheim™ or the Empire State Building, on which the LEGO Architecture series is based, provide you with a comprehensive look at the creation of these intricate sets. Learn why the LEGO team chose certain pieces and what particular challenges they faced. Read about the inspiration behind the creative processes and what designing and building techniques were used on various sets. Featuring profiles of the LEGO artists and builders who created the series and packaged in a sleek protective slipcase, LEGO Architecture: The Visual Guide is the ultimate illustrated tour of the LEGO Architecture series in all its micro-scale detail.

LEGO Architecture: The Visual Guide

Iconic buildings reimagined in LEGO bricks

Sleek, stylish, and perfectly proportioned, LEGO Architecture models are as inspirational as the landmark buildings and structures they celebrate. Go on a stunning photographic tour of the models, with unique insights into the creative process behind their designs.

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This fascinating guide includes a foreword by renowned LEGO architectural artist Adam Reed Tucker. Tucker strives to capture the essence of a particular architectural landmark in its pure sculptural form. He does not view his models as literal replicas, but rather as artistic interpretations using LEGO bricks as a medium. As he continues to explore how to capture new LEGO Architecture buildings with LEGO bricks and plates, he finds the possibilities and challenges they offer almost magical.

Table of Contents: Foreword Introduction Timeline LEGO Artist Profiles The Creative Process Fallingwater in Development Glossary LEGO Cityscape in Scale Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Fallingwater The White House Farnsworth House Rockefeller Center Robie House Brandenburg Gate Sydney Opera House Big Ben Villa Savoye Sungnyemun The Leaning Tower of Pisa Imperial Hotel United Nations Headquarters The Eiffel Tower Trevi Fountain John Hancock Center Willis Tower Empire State Building Seattle Space Needle Burj Khalifa Marina Bay Sands Index Acknowledgments

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Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide

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Have you ever wondered what the difference is between Gothic and Gothic Revival, or how to distinguish between Baroque and Neoclassical? This guide makes extensive use of photographs to identify and explain the characteristic features of nearly 300 buildings. The result is a clear and easy-to-navigate guide to identifying the key styles of western architecture from the classical age to the present day.

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The History of Visual Magic in Computers: How Beautiful Images are Made in CAD, 3D, VR and AR

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If you have ever looked at a fantastic adventure or science fiction movie, or an amazingly complex and rich computer game, or a TV commercial where cars or gas pumps or biscuits behaved liked people and wondered, “How do they do that?”,  then you’ve experienced the magic of 3D worlds generated by a computer.

3D in computers began as a way to represent automotive designs and illustrate the construction of molecules. 3D graphics use evolved to visualizations of simulated data and artistic representations of imaginary worlds.

In order to overcome the processing limitations of the computer, graphics had to exploit the characteristics of the eye and brain, and develop visual tricks to simulate realism. The goal is to create graphics images that will overcome the visual cues that cause disbelief and tell the viewer this is not real.

Thousands of people over thousands of years have developed the building blocks and made the discoveries in mathematics and science to make such 3D magic possible, and The History of Visual Magic in Computers is dedicated to all of them and tells a little of their story.

It traces the earliest understanding of 3D and then foundational mathematics to explain and construct 3D; from mechanical computers up to today’s tablets. Several of the amazing computer graphics algorithms and tricks came of periods where eruptions of new ideas and techniques seem to occur all at once. Applications emerged as the fundamentals of how to draw lines and create realistic images were better understood, leading to hardware 3D controllers that drive the display all the way to stereovision and virtual reality.

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A Visual Dictionary of Architecture

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The classic, bestselling reference on architecture now revised and expanded!

An essential one-volume reference of architectural topics using Francis D.K. Ching’s signature presentation. It is the only dictionary that provides concise, accurate definitions illustrated with finely detailed, hand-rendered drawings. From Arch to Wood, every concept, technology, material and detail important to architects and designers are presented in Ching’s unique style.

Combining text and drawing, each term is given a minimum double-page spread on large format trim size, so that the term can be comprehensively explored, graphically showing relations between concepts and sub-terms A comprehensive index permits the reader to locate any important word in the text. This long-awaited revision brings the latest concepts and technology of 21st century architecture, design and construction to this classic reference work

It is sure to be by the side of and used by any serious architect or designer, students of architecture, interior designers, and those in construction.

A Letter from Author Francis D.K. Ching
Author Francis D.K. Ching
The idea for a visual dictionary of architecture evolved slowly over a number of years as I taught in the design studio, read books and articles, and confronted terms that were either new to me, were being used in sometimes contradictory ways, or simply tossed out with the assumption that everyone knew what they meant. And so I often asked myself what did these terms really mean?

Of course, there were already general dictionaries that supplied these meanings if one bothered to look them up, and for more discipline-specific terms, there were architectural, historical, and construction dictionaries available. But few had more than a smattering of illustrations. And since architecture is such a visual art, I believed there was a need for a truly visual dictionary. The few visual dictionaries that were available simply named various things and their constituent parts but neglected to supply definitions and meanings. So there was this void to be filled.

The initial phase of the project, of course, consisted of gathering essential architectural terms and their definitions from various sources. For many, I had to reference textbooks to more fully understand the meaning of a term and then to compose a concise yet accurate definition. At times, defining one term required including other terms embedded in the definition. This led to a natural nesting of terms into sets.

As I continued to compile terms and thought about the project, it became clear that I wanted to not only properly define architectural terms but also gather them in a way that related the terms to each other in a logical and hierarchical way, using both illustrations as well as relative positioning on a page to convey these relationships. So then the truly challenging and fun part of the project was to see how I could organize the terms in such a way that their groupings into sections and subsections made sense.

To do this, I started with fairly obvious divisions, such as design and structures. Once the fundamental term was defined, I then arranged related terms in a hierarchical fashion. For example, design can be defined both as a process and a product, which led to two different sections. In the case of structures, I began with the basic idea of a structure and related concepts that applied to all structures, regardless of material or scale. The second level of terms began with basic types of structural elements, such as arches and beams, and structural systems, such as frames and plate structures, each of which deserved its own section.

Historical terms created its own set of problems regarding inclusion and proper placement. While some terms may be considered obsolete, they remained, in my view, useful as points of reference or retained a certain charm.

Once I had identified the major sections of the dictionary and assigned each term to one of the sections, I imported them into Pagemaker and began laying out the terms and definitions on each page according to their relationships to each other.

I then printed the page out and laid tracing paper over the page and roughed out ideas for illustrations. In many cases, this necessitated moving some of the terms and their definitions around. I then did the final drawings for each page on a single sheet with leader lines and arrows. After these sheets of drawings were scanned, I placed the scans in Pagemaker and adjusted the terms and definitions further to fit. In this second edition, I used Photoshop to eliminate the leader lines and arrows and used the lines and arrows within InDesign. This gave me some leeway in the placement of the images.

It has been a pleasure to develop this second edition and I hope the spirit and flavor of the first edition endures the inclusion of current technology.

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Annual Dynamics of Daylight Variability and Contrast: A Simulation-Based Approach to Quantifying Visual Effects in Architecture (SpringerBriefs in Computer Science)

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Daylight is a dynamic source of illumination in architectural space, creating diverse and ephemeral configurations of light and shadow within the built environment. Perceptual qualities of daylight, such as contrast and temporal variability, are essential to our understanding of both material and visual effects in architecture. Although spatial contrast and light variability are fundamental to the visual experience of architecture, architects still rely primarily on intuition to evaluate their designs because there are few metrics that address these factors. Through an analysis of contemporary architecture, this work develops a new typological language that categorizes architectural space in terms of contrast and temporal variation. This research proposes a new family of metrics that quantify the magnitude of contrast-based visual effects and time-based variation within daylit space through the use of time-segmented daylight renderings to provide a more holistic analysis of daylight performance.

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