[HN Gopher] Unbuilt Frank Lloyd Wright Designs Brought to Life i...
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       Unbuilt Frank Lloyd Wright Designs Brought to Life in 3-D
       Renderings
        
       Author : PaulHoule
       Score  : 84 points
       Date   : 2023-02-06 15:00 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
        
       | hcrisp wrote:
       | What? No render of his "mile-high skyscraper"?
       | 
       | https://lynceans.org/all-posts/frank-lloyd-wrights-1956-mile...
        
         | daveslash wrote:
         | Looks similar to the Burj Khalifa. Hadn't seen that before.
         | Thanks for sharing.
        
       | canadiantim wrote:
       | Has anyone had any luck feeding floorplans to something like
       | Stable Diffusion and getting accurately generated 3D renderings?
       | I've had some luck but it's still very rough
        
         | PaulHoule wrote:
         | Sounds like a job for NeRF.
        
         | gs17 wrote:
         | I'm not sure that's the best approach. It would probably work
         | better if you make a simple 3D rendering from the floorplan
         | first.
        
       | elihu wrote:
       | Frank Lloyd Wright was ahead of his time. The National Life
       | Insurance building looks like a fin-fet.
        
       | lngarner wrote:
       | Wow so cool!!
        
       | hnburnsy wrote:
       | The Spire in the Arizona Capitol image actually exists at the
       | corner of Frank Lloyd Wright Blvd and Scottsdale Road...
       | 
       | https://localwiki.org/scottsdale/Scottsdale_Spire
        
       | daveslash wrote:
       | The Arizona State Capital building interior looks like something
       | straight out of Star Trek, circa Star Trek I - VI movies - maybe
       | a smaller building at Starfleet Headquarters.
        
       | MichaelZuo wrote:
       | Incredibly beautiful designs, thanks for sharing.
        
       | MichaelZuo wrote:
       | Incredibly beautiful designs, thanks for sharing.
        
       | peatfreak wrote:
       | I'm really curious as to how these were done, or might plausibly
       | have been done. Is this indicated anywhere? After working on
       | audio signal processing for quite a few years, I'm investigating
       | image and video rendering, and applications like this are the
       | kind of thing I'm interested in.
        
       | gregoriol wrote:
       | The "National Life Insurance Building" looks a lot like this one:
       | https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hopital_beaujon.jp...
        
         | hammock wrote:
         | Also Merch Mart, which has its own history in Chicago.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchandise_Mart#/media/File:M...
         | 
         | Fun fact, the Mart supplanted a famous old Marshall Fields
         | building that was torn down - the Wholesale Store - a building
         | from which Louis Sullivan (Wright's mentor to whom this
         | National Life Insurance plan was tribute) took some of his
         | greatest inspiration.
        
       | doitLP wrote:
       | I have been inside several FLW houses/structures in the LA area
       | and I don't get it. They are massive, angular, with small windows
       | and very little natural light, and evoke the feeling that you're
       | in a burial chamber built in the 1950s. Not for me and I wonder
       | if his popularity is mostly bandwagoning like other modern art.
        
         | toast0 wrote:
         | FLW has a distinctive style with strong ideas. IMHO, I find the
         | style visually pleasing, although I'm a more of a form follows
         | function kind of person, and a lot of FLW's buildings and other
         | things like chairs and such aren't very functional, so he
         | doesn't score many points in my book.
        
         | chasil wrote:
         | Those were later period buildings.
         | 
         | Look at photos of the Robie house in Chicago, typical of his
         | early prairie period:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robie_House
         | 
         | https://www.google.com/search?q=Robie+House+interior
         | 
         | The largest building of his prairie period was the Dana-Thomas
         | house in Springfield, also worth seeing.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | OkayPhysicist wrote:
         | Most buildings from that time period wouldn't have leaned into
         | too much natural light and large windows, because residential
         | AC was far from common. That said, for the time, Wright used a
         | lot of glass, though from looking through pictures online it
         | seems he did less so in his LA buildings. I'm guessing it'd be
         | in response to the climate.
         | 
         | That said, "large and angular" fits his style pretty
         | accurately. Though the most indicative aspect of his designs is
         | the layering. A lot of his buildings are built to have a very
         | particular look of being made up of mostly flat horizontal
         | layers of various thicknesses, protruding or retracting from
         | the layers below them in varied shapes. Often these leaned
         | heavily into having a lot of right angles, but when he used
         | curves, he leaned hard into them: The Norman Lyke's House or
         | The Center for the Performing Arts in San Jose are example of
         | extremely curvy buildings still unmistakably in his style.
         | 
         | Ultimately, Wright's enduring fame can be easily understood by
         | the fact that he was novel, consistent, and prolific. His style
         | was (and to only a slightly lesser extent, still is) new and
         | different from most everything else, and he stuck to it enough
         | that people could recognize his work in particular. Combine
         | that with designing quite a few buildings, and you've got
         | yourself a recipe for the most famous architect ever.
        
         | acomjean wrote:
         | I've been to Falling Water in PA and his house in New Hampshire
         | (pro tip: set GPS to Currier Musuem for that one).
         | 
         | https://currier.org/frank-lloyd-wright/
         | 
         | I like them (the ones I've seen anyway). They have an
         | interesting and unique aesthetic. I like the design of the
         | stained glass alot. I'm not sure how practical living day to
         | day, but people did. The one in New Hampshire (Zimmerman house)
         | had wall to ceiling windows on the back side.
         | 
         | This is a fun use of 3d tech. I did some Unreal engine work,
         | and the first thing was building out an apartment interior you
         | could then move through in real time. It was kind of neat. The
         | detail in having to place all the interior lights and all was
         | something.
         | 
         | The "Groupius House" (by walter Groupius) is another modern
         | really practical house. But in this case the architect was the
         | ocupant.
         | 
         | https://www.historicnewengland.org/property/gropius-house/
        
       | Aloha wrote:
       | When you look around an FLW home, no matter its age, you're
       | struck by how startlingly modern it feels. Yes, they all have
       | flaws, but they feel modern.
        
       | chasil wrote:
       | "It's a miracle that almost all of Frank Lloyd Wright's drawings
       | have been preserved, especially considering that his successive
       | houses suffered three fires."
       | 
       | One of these fires is particularly notorious.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamah_Borthwick#Murder
        
         | hammock wrote:
         | I once worked in what was Frank Lloyd Wright's old offices. The
         | board room in the back of the building had his original safes
         | where he kept his drawings still in the wall, and you could
         | check them out. Always thought that was cool
        
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       (page generated 2023-02-06 23:01 UTC)