The London Bridge & Entrance

Right, so I decided to work on the entrance to London Bridge. Mainly because I really thought it was a very iconic part of London and was up for the challenge of re constructing it into our level. After hunting down as much visual reference as possible, I soon realised that it was this very large construction and in fact may have been one of the tallest buildings on the bridge, only rivalled by something of similar size called Nonesuch House which sat further down the bridge. 

 (bridge entrance moodboard - ahh why all so different!)

 

 (A building called Nonesuch house in comparison to the size of today's London Bridge (a similar sized building further down the bridge) 

After some initial research I found that the bridge contained around 200 buildings, some up to seven stories tall. Sources also said that the walking space on the bridge was only 4 meters wide, 2 meters to travel on each side.

(some research I did on the bridge)

http://thames.me.uk/s00049a.htm
http://forums.canadiancontent.net/history/65837-old-london-bridge-1209-1831-a.html
http://hoydensandfirebrands.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/traffic-jams-on-london-bridge-in-17th.html

http://oldlondonbridge.com/tudor.shtml

My initial concept seemed to be accurate in 2D but as soon as I started to make it in max, it all became very confusing. I had put in too many stories and measured its width far too long, and height way too short. In the labs (21/02/2013) I passed the first base model to Liam so we could check how it sat in the whitebox. We all looked over the etchings and paintings and realised very quickly the base model needed adjusting to fit into scale with everything else. 

 (2D Concept and measurements) 

With that sorted, I looked over my 2D design and am now at the stage where I am working on finalising this model. I think scaling all these buildings has been a challenge because different sources say different measurements, and it seems the more we find, the more confusing it becomes. Our method of solving this confusion is to bring it all together in the whitebox and reassess our reference material and doing so has worked pretty well. 

Some renders of work in progress

The model on the right is the revised version after importing into the whtiebox. (purple block represents scale of person)

 

My goal is to finish this building and get started on the front of bridge by our next meeting which will be the following Monday (25/02/2013), everything is going smoothly and we are on track! BOOYA!