The iconic New York city skyline involuntary springs up feelings of fatalism. However, it’s probably can not be a better showcase for indeterminism - a perfect playground of all the possible futures, unrealized ambitions, unrealized aspirations and disillusionments. This summer we wanted to explore alternative futures of the city and showcase potential alternatives in a more intuitive and interactive environment of Mixed Reality. We wanted the users to take dynamically explore parallel possibilities of how the reality, if others decisions were made.
Inspiration: Never Built New York | Queens Museum
Our biggest hurdle was to render a full working model of New York city. We easily found and were grateful for 3D version NYC 3-D Building Model - DoITT . However, this model would not work in most software with . So we have converted it with FME workbench: Tour of FME Desktop | Safe Software. In an effort to save people time for their future projects, we have published our final model of New York city: Manhattan Free 3D Model - .blend - Free3D
All buildings that could have been build can be found in the folder “maybe”. We have designed all of the buildings in Blender. We have greatly simplified original designs. We have rendered the following buildings:
- “Key Project for Ellis Island” by Frank Lloyd Wright 1959
- “Battery Park Apartments” by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rose 1959
- “80 South Street” by Santiago Calatrava 2003
- “MTVA Television Tower” by Kohn Pedersen Fox 2002
- “Rooftop Airport” by William Zeckendorf” 1945
- “Rotary Airport” by Norman Bel Geddes 1932
- “Hyperboloid” by I.M.Pei 1954
- “MOMA” by Howe and Lescaze 1930
- “UN/Midtown Connector” by William Zeckendorf and Wallace K. Harrison 1948
- “Parallax Towers” by Steven Holl 1990