ideal_buildout

This coming Sunday's new illustrative is for "Electric Waterfront". Inspirations include David Damron's unbuilt concept below. It's in lieu of DLP's Village and part of an eventual Paris resort Ideal Buildout with 10 hotels, 3 parks and a monorail. See it all on Patreon.

@OldWorldPlans That's a gorgeous building but it's not the Borse... probably an average (for that era - incredible to say) bank or commercial building. The Exchanges in those days were among a city's major landmarks. Here's Berlin's grand old exchange:

This detailed plate captures the grand interior hall of the Berlin Stock Exchange. Known for being the first building in Berlin to be constructed with a massive iron-framed glass roof, the hall provided a vast, sunlit space for hundreds of brokers. Sadly, the building was heavily damaged during WWII and later demolished.

A temple of Prussian finance. This 1882 plate features the grand facade of the Berliner Börse (Berlin Stock Exchange), situated along the Spree River. Designed by Friedrich Hitzig and completed in 1863, the building is a magnificent example of the Renaissance Revival style. Check next page for the interior details.👇

@WaltWiz1901 I find the Gemini interpretation has value as a learning tool, if I were to do revisit the drawing myself. It shows the importance of small details, shading values and deep colors to making concept art look professional.

@BuildoutIdeal honestly, part of me kinda wishes you did an updated redraw of this aerial (and others). it's all too easy to be distracted by the extra details hallucinated by the AI (a fountain where Dumbo should be? the parade route being replaced by a river?) (1/2)

I've got a handful of these drawings... it's strangely fascinating to see the results. Here's what I drew vs what Gemini did with it when prompted "make this birdseye in the style of Greg Pro or Bryan Jowers."

@_ColeTandy_ @TheCinesthetic Everyone except you, me and Quentin Tarantino, who named it as one of his favorites. The finale train sequence is as good as movies get with the combination of Zimmer's theme with the William Tell Overture.

@TheCinesthetic Hollywood tricked everyone into hating this movie…

A movie that's in your top 25 list but unlikely to be in anyone else's?

@noElonJustSport @TheCinesthetic Visuals, scope, pacing, action, humor, emotion, performances. One of the most re-watchable movies I can think of.

@BuildoutIdeal @TheCinesthetic Incredible movie. Has the most enjoyable hero/villain dynamic of any movie I've seen.

@noElonJustSport @TheCinesthetic I had about 3 in mind and this was one... scrolled down and saw this. Nice.

@TheCinesthetic Sherlock Holmes 2 (A Game of Shadows) is one of my top 5 movies ever, without a doubt, and any time I say that people are 'huh?'

This is trippy. I've been enjoying the realistic renderings of unbuilt wonders posted by @Trad_Arch_Bdays . So I used the Gemini image "enhancer" on a basic birdseye drawing I made long ago for a #HongKongDisneyland expansion (find it on Patreon). This was the result.

@OldWorldPlans In those halcyon days, it seems like every sizable city envisioned a grand Civic Center. I can't think of any that were completed to the original Vision, but Cardiff came a lot closer than most:

The 1897 floor plans. This scheme includes two massive, independent buildings: the City Hall and the Law Courts. Thanks for being here.

Architect Rickards' astonishing 1897 chosen design for the Cardiff Town Hall and Law Courts competition in Wales, UK. Look at the massive dome and the sculptural density—a great example of Edwardian Baroque logic. Check the next page for the current look... 👇

@OldWorldPlans Over its full length, at its pre-war peak, Friedrichstr had over 80 eckhausen - corner buildings. All were beautiful, many even more extraordinary than your superlative example (Franzoschstr). I've mapped them all out.

A masterpiece of German Neo-Renaissance: In 1881, the legendary architect Hans Grisebach was commissioned by the pencil tycoon Johann Faber to design this grand department and office building on Berlin’s bustling Friedrichstraße. Long before the digital age, every line was hand-drawn. Stunning! x.com/OldWorldPlans/…

@CygnusParkYT That makes sense. Forgot we're in the AI fake era.

@BuildoutIdeal Top right is ai generated

@pnickdurham This is one of several lovely Sears Catalog houses in my town:

"We need to bring back Sears-style home kits" For 32 years, any family in America could buy a quality home without a contractor, without a bank, without ever leaving their kitchen table, for 30% lower cost vs conventional construction. In 1908, Sears issued its first catalog of homes, offering 44 distinct designs, ranging in price from $360-$2,890. The buyer picked a design they loved, placed an order, and Sears shipped 30,000 pre-labeled parts in two railroad boxcars to the nearest depot. Nearly all building components were included in the kit, framing lumber, doors, windows, trim, shingles, nails, hardware, paint, even an early version of drywall they called "goodwall." Every piece of lumber was stamped with a code matching a 75-page leather-bound instruction manual. Concrete, plumbing, and electrical were the only things sourced locally. Sears homes don't exist without a rail network. Freight rates were cheap enough that shipping 25 tons of lumber cross-country actually penciled out and connected nearly every town in America. The other breakthroughs were postal related...Rural Free Delivery (1896) and Parcel Post (1913) meant Sears could reach customers who had never set foot in a department store. Sears wasn't the first to do this fwiw. Aladdin Homes out of Bay City, Michigan started in 1906, two years before Sears. Montgomery Ward followed in 1918. At its peak, there were over a dozen mail-order home companies going after the same buyer. But Sears had the catalog reach, the brand trust, and eventually the financing. By 1916, they started offering pre-cut lumber so buyers didn't have to measure and saw every board themselves. This cut construction time by about 40% and significantly reduced lumber waste. Sears advertised 30% savings over conventional construction. How did they achieve this? Vertical integration. They owned their own mills, bought in massive bulk, and the pre-cut system meant you didn't need a full crew of skilled carpenters on-site. About half of all buyers built the homes themselves. Over 32 years, they released 370+ designs across every style of the era. Craftsman bungalows, Colonial Revivals, Cape Cods, Tudor, Foursquares. The crown jewel was the Magnolia, a 10-room mansion inspired by Longfellow's house. Only 7 are known to still exist. In 1911, Sears started financing homes directly. They offered 5-15 year mortgages at 6-7% interest that didn't ask about race, ethnicity, or gender. During Jim Crow, when banks across America were redlining Black neighborhoods and refusing loans to women, they were viewed as the most egalitarian lender in the country. The homes were not cheap throwaway structures either. In fact, they were legally classified as single-family homes, not manufactured housing. They used old-growth lumber, real hardwood floors, and solid wood trim. A Sears Barrington in DC's Woodley Park cost $2,425 in the 1920s and is worth over $2 million today (!). Pittsburgh still has roughly 1,000 Sears homes standing. Cincinnati has 800+. In 1918, Standard Oil bought 149 in a single order for about $1 million to house coal miners in Carlinville, Illinois. The whole neighborhood is still there. They appraise at or above comparable conventional homes from the same era. Then the Depression hit. Thousands of mortgage holders defaulted. The mortgage losses exceeded the homebuilding division's entire 25-year profit history. Sears decided to kill the mortgage program in 1933 and wound down home sales by 1942. Around 75,000 homes were sold during the era. Why didn't Sears try again post Depression with new lending standards? Well, the FHA was created in 1934 and introduced 20-30 year fixed-rate mortgages with 10% down. VA loans followed in 1944 with zero down for veterans. FHA and VA programs favored professional builders over owner-builders. Eventually too, conventional construction gradually absorbed every innovation that Sears kit homes had introduced. Pre-cut lumber, drywall, pre-hung doors, roof trusses, plywood all became standard in regular stick-built construction. The gap between a "kit home" and a "conventional home" narrowed. Its best ideas were copied and it just became how everyone builds. When people say "bring back Sears homes," what are they actually asking for? I don't think it's a catalog of beautiful floor plans. I don't think it's a just cheaper kit of parts. What ppl are asking for is a home with quality materials, non-commoditized design, at a price a normal family can afford (if they take on the risk of building), and a process simple enough that you don't need to be a general contractor to navigate. So the Sears playbook -- cost and quality, the holy grail -- has to be rebuilt for modern times. What does the modern version of this look like? Right now, nobody can produce a single-family home for 30% less than conventional construction at scale. Sears could because they were vertically integrated into lumber at a time when cutting/measuring was the bottleneck. That bottleneck doesn't exist anymore. Pre-cut lumber, trusses, pre-hung doors are all standard. On-site stick construction is actually quite efficient today. The only paths to meaningfully lower cost are reducing skilled labor hours on-site and reducing the amount of material that goes into a home. Factory approaches haven't penciled out because of CapEx, cyclical demand (see: Depression, GFC), transport constraints, and coordination disadvantages. The permitting and code environment has also only become more complex. Any system that wants to scale nationally has to navigate thousands of local code variations. I see a world where a builder offers a generative design catalog to their customers, runs a hub-and-spoke model with microfactories or 3D printers, and dispatches kits locally for all other building components. Long live Sears kits.

Yesterday's illustration was the beginning of a re-imagined Disney Springs. Part 1 was breathing new life into Pleasure Island. Check it all out on Patreon.

@OldWorldPlans The design competitions of that era are an incredible thing to discover. For every great building that was actually built, globally, there were a number spectacular designs that went unselected. I dream of a world where we never abandoned the Art of Building. V&A unselected:

A Victorian crown for London! This 1899 sketch illustrates the prize-winning design by Sir Aston Webb for the completion of the Victoria and Albert Museum. By creating the grand Cromwell Road facade, Webb successfully unified the museum’s sprawling collections behind a cohesive, regal exterior that remains one of London's most iconic architectural achievements.

@1adimotesi @JuliusMasteroso Beauty wasn't elite. Beauty was everywhere you looked. Emperors and Laborers passed under the same ornate street lamps and city building frontages, over the same incredible bridges and entered the same vaulted churches. An example of how the working "poor" really lived:

You’re not looking at the past. You’re looking at a curated version of it. That beauty wasn’t universal. It was elite. But that does not make beauty unimportant. The mistake of the present was expanding access while lowering aesthetic ambition. People do not only need function. They also need beauty. Standardization is understandable. Soullessness is not.

Vivimos en las ruinas de una civilización superior

@Aetheron @JuliusMasteroso It wasn't the IR that killed beauty & craft in what we built. The IR was 18th and 19th C. and only increased the scale of beauty, which peaked in the early 20th C. The Fall came when we stopped teaching beauty & craft in the tech/applied arts/arch. schools after the World Wars.

One of the greatest transformations in traditional crafts and classical architectural beauty occurred with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution. Massive factories, steam engines, and mass production replaced the slow, meticulous work of independent artisans. What we see in this video is the direct consequence, the shift from ornate, handcrafted door handles, hinges, and railings — full of artistic detail and soul — to cheap, soulless, mass-produced hardware. The most visible changes were: Energy: From windmills, water wheels, and animals → to steam and coal Work: From skilled craftsmen working at home → to thousands of workers in noisy factories Aesthetic: From beauty and ornamentation → to pure functionality and minimalism Society: From rural life to explosive urbanization, and the birth of the modern working class This video doesn’t just show old vs new door handles. It shows how we traded craftsmanship and beauty for efficiency and quantity.

@dlongenecker1 @the_culturist_ Very confused by this. Do you mean Modernists? Protestants built countless beautiful, ornate, fine-crafted structures - churches and secular - right up until the Post-War, Modernist Era, when everyone stopped doing so. Protestant cathedral built 1905:

@the_culturist_ Protestantism considered such things to not only be irrelevant, but a theological obscenity. People build according to their beliefs.

The level of craftsmanship at Wells Cathedral is just absurd. The scissor arch is a wonder of medieval architecture, built in 1338. Where did this kind of craftsmanship go?

Last Sunday's post on Patreon was the first of a new series exploring a re-imagined, built-out Disneyland Paris resort: the plan is to eventually illustrate ten themed hotels, a different RDE district, a 3rd Gate and water park; all connected by monorail.

Glimpses of my two latest illustrations, showing an alternate vision of the parks & resorts (and ALOT more monorail track). Every Sunday afternoon on Patreon - for many months now - I've made a new post featuring my "maps". For those who have joined, I will continue the effort.