Sources

If you're wondering where any of this information came from so you can go off and do your own research on the wonder that is futurist architecture, these sources may help you out:

http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/ohio/cleveland/gehry/lewis.html

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peter_B._Lewis_Building_-_oblique_1.jpg

http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/peterblewis/

http://blog.cleveland.com/architecture/2012/11/the_10-year_old_peter_b_lewis.html

http://www.ohiochannel.org/medialibrary/Media.aspx?fileId=113012

http://www.mimoa.eu/projects/United%20States/Cleveland/Peter%20B.%20Lewis%20Building

http://brentdurken.com/tag/peter-b-lewis-building/

http://weatherhead.case.edu/about/facilities/lewis/views.cfm

http://www.livecleveland.org/4images/details.php?image_id=441

http://telos.tv/blog/?p=73

http://www.galinsky.com/buildings/peterblewis/

http://weatherhead.case.edu/about/facilities/lewis/facts

Peter B. Lewis Building

Futurist architecture tends to not be boring to look at, so for the next part of our project, I got some proof of that:

And now for the interior!

These are all pictures I stole off of google images of the Peter B. Lewis Building at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio. It's a prime example of futurist architecture, and for more information you can listen to this podcast:

Interior of the building

You've now seen the outside of this wonderous building, so you may be confused as to what it would be used for. Turns out, it's a prison! Actually it was supposed to be business building, but then we got this project to draw a one point perspective drawing of a room, without being told that it had to be the interior of  out model. My drawing ended up being of a prison, and considering it featured a disco ball, which is a perfect match for the model, I figured it would be easy enough to just turn my building into a prison. Anyway, now this prison is not only in the shape of a spaceship and super shiny; it's also the home to several disco balls.

Our assignment was to draw a room from one point perspective and have it feature at least 2 objects. Mine, being a prison, has a toilet that can be seen from inside the cell, many bars for the cell wall, a guard chair with a paper cup sitting near it, and of course, the disco ball. The weird thing with this, was that while everything was supposed to be drawn in perspective with one point, the blocks of light coming from the disco ball had to be drawn in perspective with the center of the disco ball.

SKETCHUP

As there are no pictures of the model standing straight up, a SketchUp will have to do:

The SketchUp was the next part of the project, and many of us soon learned that there are some things that are much easier to make in real life than on a computer. Apperently, SketchUp promotes uniformity among all architecture, as it basically had the basic square and circle shapes and no easy way to differ from those. Needless to say, it was difficult to get the basic shape of mine, and as far as I can tell, it would have been nearly impossible to create the non-flat top that appears on the real model. So, no, this is not a perfect representation of the real thing, but at least it's not collapsed under the weight of a billion mirrors.

Futurist Building- Process

As you may notice, my model basically looks like an unknown shape covered in mirrors. That's because it is. I can't say I drew a sketch first, or even had any idea of what I was going to build other than I wanted it to be about the shape of the Boomerang logo from Cartoon Network. I ended up just covering a bunch of newspaper with duct tape to form the initial shape, and then disco ball-afied it with every single small, square, mirror the Micheals I went to had. Anyway, this caused it to be only newspaper on the inside, but having to support the weight of a whole bunch of mirrors on the outside, which just might have something to do with it tipping backwards and looking like a spaceship taking off. I don't have any pictures of it when it was standing straight up, but I assure you- It was quite defiant of physics. Unfortunately, in the end, gravity won as always, but the nails I used to attach the duct tape and newspaper sculpture to the base board held up well enough to keep in verticalish.

Futurist Architecture

Back in the early 20th century a bunch of super artsy Italians started a futurism movement founded around the idea of bringing ideas of the future into art. Architecture, being a subcategory of art, was destined to become part of this movement, and eventually it did, which is the reason for any war or machine age technology themed buildings you may see. These structures were supposedly supposed to represent the people's hopes and dreams for the future, but as the genre originated around the time of World War 1, some are just gruesome depictions of war.

You would think, considering the fancy technology displayed in these buildings is now well outdated, that the futurist style of architecture would have ended by now, but no. As time goes by, futurism moves on to display more modern ideas of the future, as well as showing up in some other genres like googie or art deco. Basically anything that stands out as ahead of the times could be placed in the futurist category  Currently, there is a post modern futurism style of architecture, which features spacecraft and sci-fi themes. This is what I ended up devoting a few hours of my life into making a super mind-blowingly accurate model of. Here's the result: