Small Town : Architecture: Model making, with the help of computers and new material, has entered the high-tech era.
The luxurious lobby of a high-rise office building on Wilshire Boulevard was unfolding on a television screen in warm shades of granite and marble.
The camera swept through the lower level, paused briefly before two abstract paintings and then traveled along the brass banister of the staircase leading to the sun-washed upper level, where it caught the twinkling reflection of recessed lights on the marble walls.
The sumptuous details looked as if they had been lifted from a corporate version of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” but Robin Leach would have a hard time fitting in here.
As realistic as the building looked on the television screen, it was actually an architectural model that stands only 7 feet tall, and that’s on top of a pedestal. Its “lobby” is slightly larger than a shoe box, the paintings no bigger than gum wrappers.
“You couldn’t get your finger through the door,” explained Adrian Velicescue, a video maker who shot the footage using a special, flexible lens the size of a drinking straw for the developers of Center West, a 22-story office tower in Westwood.
The video and the model it showcases are examples of a technological revolution sweeping the craft, and business, of architectural presentation.
Architects have long used models to demonstrate their designs, but even 10 years ago, they were fragile and crude things with black squares of paper for windows and mirrors for reflecting pools.
Cut by hand from cardboard and balsa wood using Exacto knives in one-man shops, the models could take a year to make and fell apart after a couple of months of use.
But now, plastics, computer-operated milling machines and new techniques for simulating stone finishes and tinted glass have made the models much more realistic and durable.
No floor tile, window mullion or shadow is ignored in the quest for verisimilitude. Tiny lights fed by thread-like fiber-optics illuminate interiors so detailed that not only can subtle differences be noted in stone finishes on the exterior, the seams between “marble” slabs covering walls can be counted.
Computerization, along with the advent of larger, more professionally run model shops, has dramatically cut the time it takes to make a model in a scale anywhere from 32 to 480 times smaller than the planned building.
With between 15 and 35 model makers on staff, any of the five larger architectural model-making firms in Los Angeles and Orange counties can produce a miniature skyscraper in weeks, sometimes even days.
“The computer chip has made a terrific difference,” said Harry Wolf, senior design principal of the architectural firm of Ellerbe Becket in Santa Monica. “We’ve had models built over a weekend.”
Architects continue to carve cardboard with Exacto knives in the preliminary stages of designing a building, but they increasingly rely on these models--which cost as much as $250,000--to iron out last-minute kinks in designs and to win competitions for hotly contested commissions.
And developers use them to secure financing, to win approvals from governmental agencies and to lease the buildings.
“When you’re building a $400-million building, it’s a small investment,” said Nigel Young, shop manager for the Culver City model-making firm of Dimensional Presentations.
The technological revolution has improved the status of a trade that once “was perceived as artsy-craftsy,” said Newport Beach model maker Doug Yates.
Now architects and developers “consider a good model builder to be part of the team necessary to build a good building,” said Scott Harrington, co-owner of The Model Shop in El Segundo.
But the enhanced status came with a price. A new competitiveness--and instability--has come to the once sleepy industry. Model makers now complain of competitors who poach clients and deliberately un derbid jobs in the hope of winning future business.
In the last decade, two managers of Dimensional Presentations in Culver City have left to set up rival shops, taking clients, jobs and workers with them.
Once, Dimensional Presentation’s founder, Leonard A. Stern, retaliated by getting an 18-month injunction barring one of the former managers from working for Stern’s clients. And at least two local firms, including Stern’s, have changed hands over the same period.
Prominent members of this fractious fraternity include:
--Dimensional Presentations. With a staff of 22, it is known for its work on high-profile skyscrapers in downtown Los Angeles--the Biltmore Tower, First Interstate World Center, California Plaza--as well as projects in Canada, Saudia Arabia and the Orient.
Founded by Stern in 1976, and bought last year by the London model-making firm of Presentation Unit, it is building models of Metropolis, a downtown development being designed by architect Michael Graves, and Canary Wharf, a mammoth waterfront development in London.
--Glenn R. Johnson Architectural Models in Orange, which made the models for John Wayne Airport, Warner Center and the Greater Los Angeles World Trade Center. Founded by Johnson, a 25-year veteran model maker, it is one of the busier shops in Southern California with a staff of 28 that also does models of the scenes of accidents for personal injury lawsuits.
--Model Concepts in Santa Monica, also one of the busier model makers with two shops and 35 employes. Founded four years ago by Bijan Fahimian, the former Dimensional Presentations manager against whom Stern got the injunction, its models include the interior for Center West in Westwood, a planned expansion of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove and the Gene Autry Museum.
Among the former Dimensional Presentation clients that Fahimian has won are the Pacific Design Center (for its new green wing) and the king of Saudia Arabia, who commissioned Model Concepts to continue work on models of two holy cities.
--Model Technics in Newport Beach, a 15-man shop owned by Yates, who has 15 years in the business. It has built models for the Universal Studios theme park in Orlando, Fla., Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, the city of Santa Clarita and the Irvine Co., which plans a large coastal development in Orange County.
--Model Works in El Segundo is owned by another Dimensional Presentations alumnus, Josh Maron, whose accomplishments include the model for the San Diego Convention Center. With 10 model makers on staff, the 10-year-old shop is relatively small, but it can pool resources with the Model Shop, a two-person firm that shares the premises.
Model makers dispute precisely who let the genie out of the bottle, but by all accounts there was a certain inevitability to the introduction of the computer into the Southern California model-making scene in the early 1980s.
The steel-and-glass box that had dominated commercial architecture for so long was giving way to more complicated designs with sumptuous materials. Cardboard and balsa wood could not do justice to these new buildings.
Also by this time, architects were converting to computerized drafting systems. Building dimensions and proportions that once were found only on blueprints were being stored on floppy disks.
With some tinkering, the disks could direct automated milling machines to cut what the architect had envisioned, eliminating the thousands of manual computations required to translate a design from a blueprint into a scale model.
Able to make cuts as narrow as three strands of hair, these new machines opened the door to new levels of precision and detail. “The parts we make are more accurate than the building,” Fahimian said.
Other tricks in the model makers bag include large kiln-like “vacuum metalizing chambers” to coat plastics with metallic finishes that simulate mirrored glass in any degree of reflectivity. Photographic chemical milling, a computerized process that uses an acid bath, is used to cut tiny railings, doors and girders out of brass. Silk-screening puts such layers of detail as the shadow cast by a window ledge onto the windowpane beneath it.
At his Newport Beach shop, Yates is perfecting a lower-cost alternative to models for architects and developers who want them only to photograph.
A computer artist melds a photograph of a building’s proposed site with a computer-generated image from architectural plans. The resulting series of images, which sell for between $1,500 and $2,500, closely resemble still photographs taken of an actual building.
“You can get the ‘camera’ into a position that wouldn’t be possible with the real thing,” he explained. “You don’t have walls to bump into or cliffs to fall off.”
Design changes are easier too. With a flick of a mouse on a computer board, the building’s color scheme changes.
For all the newfangled technology, however, models remain largely handmade.
Model makers, who learn the trade on the job, manually glue together the plastic frame from which they then hang the model’s “skin” or exterior covering. Also made of plastic, these coverings, whether tile, stone or some other material, are painted by hand.
Plastic tiles destined to represent such mottled materials as marble or granite get sprayed on the underside with several colors of paint. This gives the appearance of the veins running through highly polished stone. Plastic destined to represent materials with uniform coloration such as ceramic tile get a coat of paint on the outside.
The hundreds of window frames and panes of “glass” that make up a typical skyscraper are individually fitted into place by a model maker wearing a mask against the strong fumes of industrial adhesives.
So it goes with the trees, shrubs and other landscaping flourishes that add another dimension of reality to models. Model makers frequently make them by hand from steel wool, bits of foam and flocking.
An odd car or paper figure is posted near the door of the building to establish scale. Johnson, who got interested in model making as a boy, tries so hard to be realistic that he uses cars designed for model railroad settings.
Such attention to detail paid off for J. Todd Stoutenborrough, a partner in the architectural firm of Leason, Pomery & Associates in Orange.
He and two developers used a 15-square-foot model by Johnson’s firm to win a competition for the Burbank Gateway Center, a 42-acre commercial and retail complex under construction in downtown Burbank.
“Everyone had a model, but none was as impressive as ours,” he said. “It’s an emotional thing. If they can see your design, they can start to fall in love with it. They come to want it.”
A model of the so-called “Green Apple,” the latest addition to the Pacific Design Center, proved as valuable when it came to getting approvals in 1985.
Made by Dimensional Presentations, it helped the project’s developers demonstrate how they planned to mitigate the impact of an adjoining parking structure opposed by nearby residents, said James Goodwin, who was the center’s vice president of marketing at the time.
Under pressure from residents, city planners would have “just out and out rejected the parking structure if we hadn’t had a model of it,” said Goodwin, who now works as a consultant.
“People are really suspicious when they’re attacking something. They know how easily pictures can be manipulated. They want to see how your project will look in three dimensions. You gain trust that way.”
Model making’s rank-and-file also applauds advances made possible by computer automation.
“It’s taken out so much of the monotony,” said Phil Schouten, a Model Concepts employee who has been in the business for 25 years.
Based on the dimensions of a single triangle, a computer figured out the dimensions of the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove for a model of planned expansion. The building’s frame, made of acid-etched brass, was finished in two weeks, freeing Schouten to move onto another project.
“It could have taken six months” to manually compute the hundreds of thousands of angles on the faceted glass structure, he said. “I’d be sick of it by then.”
As models have improved so has the art of photographing them. Using computers, such architectural photographers as Mark Lohman seamlessly combine a photograph of the building’s proposed site with a photograph of the model shot from the same angle and under similar lighting conditions.
“The really good models,” he said, “are hard to discern from buildings in photographs. Ten or 15 years ago, you’d say, ‘Boy, that’s a nice shot, but it’s definitely a model.’ ”
Velicescue, the video maker, takes the process a step further, with videos that give viewers the impression of walking through the proposed building.
A “snorkel lens” fits into the tiniest corners of a model. A remote-controlled motor attached to a table gently glides the model toward the lens, moving the viewer through the building.
Models usually are seen “from a bird’s point of view,” he explained. “We’re giving you a human point of view.”
Anticipated advances in the field, meanwhile, fit more closely with Buck Rogers’ point of view. The laser is expected to replace the steel bits on milling machines, making them much faster and more accurate. Milling may one day be replaced by stereo lithography, a process under development that molds pieces of plastic from a vat of liquid goo by shooting lasers through it.