I’ve never been inside of Rietveld’s Schroder house, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian homes are among my favorite.  I found replicas of these buildings in Google 3D Warehouse, but orbiting around them in SketchUp is choppy at best, and doesn’t provide a sense of immersion, or of actually being inside of the building the way a virtual model does.  So, just for fun, I imported them into my Virtual Project Space this afternoon using Peter Quirk’s tutorial.  It took less then 45 minutes, and I invited some friends to tour them with me.

These aren’t very high fidelity models, the materials need some work, and I can’t be sure that they’re 100% accurate.  But it certainly provides a strong sense of the building’s form and space, and the shadows are a nice effect.  Plus, the price was right.  With some rendered materials, and a little landscaping, these could really come to life.

If you can’t make it to the real site (infinitely preferable whenever possible!), I can’t think of a better way to explore and understand an architectural space than through an immersive, realtime 3D walk-through.  I had a few friends from hundreds of miles away alongside me (logged in from their home computers) as we walked through these virtual buildings, but it made me wonder – why not a class of architecture students?

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