TITLE: Frank LLoyd Wright's "Mile High" Illinois Tower
NAME: Lance Purple
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: lpurple@netcom.com
TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: milehigh.jpg
ZIPFILE: milehigh.zip
RENDERER USED: 
    POVRay 3.01 for Windows

TOOLS USED: 
    perl (to generate roadNN.pov),
            xv   (gamma correction/JPG conversion)

RENDER TIME: 
    5.5 hours

HARDWARE USED: 
    66 Mhz PC

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


    Commemorative plaque from the 528th floor observation deck
    of the Illinois Mile-High Tower. First proposed in 1959 by
    Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 2009, the Mile High is
    the tallest habitable structure in the world.

    The most significant barriers to construction of this great
    Chicago monument were not structural materials or assembly
    techniques; in fact, it would have been possible to build it
    in 1959.  What was lacking was the technology to provide such
    a tall building with elevator service!  The introduction in
    the late 1990s of linear-induction elevators (such as Otis's
    Odyssey TM  system) made it practical to transport hundreds
    of thousands of tenants up and down a single set of shafts,
    with spare elevator cabs waiting on horizontal sidings.

    The other major engineering challenge, wind loads, was met by
    the invention of the tuned mass damper. A massive weight moves
    back and forth under computerized control, to counteract any
    horizontal forces caused by wind gusts. As a result, the top
    floor will sway less than 50 cm during a 120 mph wind gust.
    The expected lifespan of the "Mile High" is at least 200 years.
     

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


    When I saw the topic, I decided to do FLW's Mile High Tower.
    Yes, I know it hasn't actually been built -yet-, but it was
    doable even with 1950s materials, and now that we have the
    linear-induction elevator and mass-damper technologies, it's
    economically feasible too. And this thing would -definitely-
    be a Great Engineering Achievement. I mean, look how tiny
    the Sears Tower and the Hancock Tower are next to it!

    To get the shoreline data, I downloaded the USGS 1:100000 scale
    Digital Line Graph files for the Chicago area, and converted the
    "Hydrography" data into prisms by hand. For the road network, I
    wrote a perl script to convert the USGS "Transportation:Roads"
    data into a triangle mesh.

    Next, I got a tourist map of Chicago which gave major building
    heights, and hand-modelled several dozen major skyscrapers, as
    boxes, cones, etc. and positioned them using coordinate data
    from the USGS file. I came up with some decent texture maps to
    look like lighted office-tower floors.

    Now it was time to model the Mile-High Tower. I had a diagram
    from an old Frank Lloyd Wright book which -appeared- to give
    accurate coordinates; but looked nothing like his perspective
    drawings when I rendered it. So I eyballed the measurements,
    and it came out looking great.

    The hardest part was filling up the ground plane. I wrote a
    set of loops to make a heightfield map by scattering small
    random buildings across downtown Chicago, and then masked out
    the roads in black. It took several tries to get the road
    grid aligned, so that I wouldn't have random buildings in
    the middle of the streets; and I'm still not 100% happy
    with it; but since I don't have a plat map of downtown
    Chicago it'll have to do. The major buildings are semi-
    accurately modelled anyway.

    Now that I had the main scene modelled, I wanted to work in
    all the dedications FLW gave in the margin of the sketches.
    So I used an orthographic projection and lots of text objects
    to make the text plaques, and to paste them next to (and even
    covering) the main panorama, on a plane of parchment texture.
    
    NOTE: All image maps used in this scene were generated by POV.
          Nothing came from any paint programs (in case all of the
          text makes you suspicious). It's all POV primitives.