page twelve

The Folly

Everything else on this site is flat. The Atlas looks straight down at the ground, the Observatory pins stars to the inside of a sphere, the Chronicle slides borders about on a plan. Nothing here had ever been stood up. This room takes today's number, designs one building with it, and then builds it: podium, walls, openings, roof, ornament, shadow and all. Drag it round. Nobody is ever going to build this.

Drag to walk round it. Scroll on it to move closer. Space bar starts and stops the turntable. The figures on the plaza are 1.7 m tall, for scale.

Finish
Seed — Idiom — Height —

Every number in that table was settled by the date, and none of it is stored anywhere.

How the date becomes a building

  1. 01

    Choose an idiom

    The seed picks one of seven ways of building — a classical temple front, a peristyle rotunda, a Gothic revival chapel, a Moorish kiosk, a tiered pagoda, a sham castle or a late concrete monument. The idiom decides which stones and roofing metals are even on the table, what shape the openings are, and what the building is allowed to grow: towers, domes, battlements, buttresses, corner kiosks, a stair core.

  2. 02

    Set it out

    Then the dimensions: a footprint, a number of storeys, a storey height, a bay rhythm. A podium of two to four steps is laid, the walls are extruded off the plan as a prism, and the openings are spaced along each wall in that wall's own coordinates — so a round-arched window on a curved drum bends round the drum, and a lancet on a buttressed flank sits between the buttresses.

  3. 03

    Put a roof on it

    Gables, hips, pyramids, domes and onion domes all come out of the same few primitives. A dome is a stack of rings whose radius and height follow a profile curve; make the curve bulge and then come to a point and the same code produces the onion. Lanterns, finials, ringed masts and crenellations go on last.

  4. 04

    Draw it

    There is no 3D library here. Every surface is a polygon with an outward normal; the camera rotates the world, clips it against a near plane and divides by depth. Faces pointing away are thrown out, the rest are sorted back to front and painted in that order, and each one is shaded by how squarely it faces the sun — which moves with the light slider, so the same folly can be seen at seven in the morning, flattened by noon, or lit from the inside at midnight.

Tomorrow this building is demolished and never drawn again. If you want the same number doing other work: the Chronicle gives a continent eight hundred years of history, the Atlas raises the ground it would have stood on, the Codex invents the alphabet its plaque would be cut in, the Orrery hangs a family of worlds round a new star, the Observatory scatters a night sky, the Menagerie breeds something to live in the grounds, the Almanac files the day's news and the Chimes play it.