Here’s a building that I made, which is based on the 432 Park Ave residential skyscraper under construction in NYC. It’s a simple building, but I love simple, elegant, minimalist designs.
Some of the spoilers contain multiple pictures, so it’s easier just to use the arrows on your keypad to scroll while hovering over the spoilers. The images are cut off, so one must click “view image” in order to see them in their entirety.
I made the building a few weeks ago. I built out the foundation and double-height lobby floor in creative mode, then copied and pasted the floors in MCEdit. This process took roughly half an hour. I then used creative mode to add floor plates to create the single-height condo floors, apply the furnishings to the condos, and build out the pool.
I was wondering if I have permission to build it on this lot in the city. After eying things up, it’s the perfect-sized lot for this. Aesthetically, it would fit well with its surroundings and create a nice peak in the skyline. The black building next to it is similar to its real-world neighbor.
i honestly have no issue with it, and if he likes your work enough, im sure that _andy wouldn’t mind you building in the new bigcity as that does seem pretty good…
honestly i would wait, i can see the potential to make _andy incredibly happy. just make sure if you can’t keep up with his scales, you gracefully decline, and he tends to make monster buildings.
Now normally, I don’t give advice on buildings. However recently I’ve been building on TVB. I’ve learned a lot from there, and had a lot of people give me advice and critique about my buildings. Here’s what I can say about the building and how to make it better :3. Use two or three spaces between floors (for lighting and different ceiling/flooring colours). Use a different material for the furniture, as it’s the same as the floors. Essentially, just make the floor/ceiling and furniture different than the actual building.
The floor/ceiling plates in the actual building are approximately the thickness of a half-slab, which is what I used. To be a bit more accurate, they’d have to be centered, but that’s impossible to do in Minecraft, so I opted to place them at “door” level. Due to the large windows and energy efficiency of the building, interior lighting is used sparingly. In my version, I placed redstone wiring on the mechanical floors, and ran them down shafts in order to have switch activated lighting in some of the condos. The condos that don’t benefit from overhead mechanical floors use wall lighting and lamps, combined with natural lighting from the large windows.
Some of the floors utilize beacons as overhead lights, since they provide nice modern lighting when used in that fashion. I’ve found many uses for the beacons–from futuristic road lighting, to light posts. For the sake of accuracy and aesthetics, having such thick floor plates in this building seems unnecessary. This building utilizes 14,000 psi concrete, so having thin floor plates gives it the benefit of larger floor-to-ceiling spans. For some massive office buildings, I do three and on rare occasions four block thick floor plates in order to have intricate ceiling lighting, but sometimes it’s fun to experiment with different techniques and create unique buildings that utilize their own floor and ceiling methods.
As far as the furniture goes, this is a residential building, so every condo is to be decorated differently. I chose mainly white to give a sort of timeless Greek feel to that particular condo, which I just couldn’t replicate with anything else. I wanted to do justice to the renderings, since they hint at a similar theme.
Another thing I’d like to point out is that I always include cores in my buildings that contain stairwells and elevator shafts. Often times I notice that people overlook these crucial elements when they construct skyscrapers in Minecraft, but as an engineer, I feel the urge to build structures that could truly function in the real-world.
One thing I will say about this, and I know it can’t be helped as it’s a replica of a real-life building, but the exterior is quite lacking in details.
If you take a look around both BigCity’s (/warp bigcity and /warp newbigcity) You will notice that even the ‘samey’ buildings have little extra bits in to stop it from looking like a wall of whatever main material is used and glass.
Sometimes breaking up the solid wall just a little improves the aesthetics massively.
I know not much can be done about this particular building, but for future reference try not to make your buildings solid walls of just one material. At least not on the visible sides anyway.
