Hudson Life Building: An Introduction
We begin our journey on the next urban structure scratch built by Chris Brimley.
Used with permission by Flickr user pinehurst19475
Introduction
The few of our visitors on N Scale Limited that came over from my former blog, Rotating Coupler, will remember the months of work I put into my Dominion Trust Building. It was a fun project to work on at times and at others it was just work, to put it nicely. Surprisingly to myself the building turned out better than expected. It originally was going to be a shadow of the prototype, just a building to fill a void in the skyline of my future city of Hudson. Strangely the building became much more. I kept challenging myself to try new things on the building. It was after all only the second scratch built structure I attempted, but was the sixth completed (I took some time off from it).
Today I am announcing my next large commercial structure to cause me to lose sleep at night. I call it the Hudson Life Building, a ten story low rise Beaux-Arts structure. It will be modeled after the prototype Detroit Life Building and will remain as close as possible to the original. Like the Dominion Trust Building, I will attempt to update in a similar fashion on every Sunday on its progress.
Left click to open, then right click to save.
Prototype
Located in Detroit Michigan at 2210 Park Avenue, the Detroit Life Building or Detroit Building was built in 1923. It was designed by the architects Arnold & Shreve for the now defunct Detroit Life Insurance Company whom had offices on the top four floors.
Today the building sits shuddered sense 1977, but initial work was begun to restore the building in 2006 by removing all of the asbestos. The renovation is being designed by the firm of Kraemer Design Group who specialists in historic preservation. Please visit the website of the building that was created for its restoration.
Used with permission by Flickr user pinehurst19475
Construction
The method that I will be using will be very similar to how I built the Gordon Building, just on a larger scale. It will primarily be built from strip & sheet styrene, but I have a few ideas of using paper for some critical design elements on the structure, we will see how that is going to work out. Not including the windows on the back, there is 176 windows, about the same as the Dominion. This time around I am not going to hand frame each window, I have two different methods that “should” simplify the process.
Used with permission by Flickr user pinehurst19475
Stay Tuned
I hope you will enjoy this next project of mine, cause I am very excited to finally start it. Next Sunday will be the first post of the actual construction. Please stay tuned and get ready to learn and see me make mistakes, but hopefully I will have another building worthy enough to stand in the city of Hudson.
Thank you to Flickr user pinehurst19475, for his permission to use his photographs.
About the Author
