The Cyrus Thompson Memorial Community Center! (?)

Looks like we (possibly) finally got the Cyrus Thompson Community Center in I24!
They moved the Cyrus Thompson statue across the street and put in a new building right behind him. You can't enter it (that I know of, correct me if I'm wrong). I don't know if there's any official in-game confirmation that this is the Community Center, but still, it's a nice touch.


It's really tall!


Unfortunately, there's a tree blocking the statue as soon as you exit the tram station, so you don't get a great view of them together

The contrast between the old buildings and that new one just looks terrible.

Agreed. Most of Kings Row dates back to the 1930s or earlier, while this is a new building. You get this effect a lot in cities. New structures really stand out. London is a great example.

Would be really nice if we could go inside, though.

Kings Row and Brickstown are both missing the upgraded tress, rocks and grass that DA got - those make a big difference to the look of an old zone.

I like the look of the new building in Kings Row. It looks like a run-down-inside '70's building in the middle of a pre-World War II neighborhood, which is exactly how I've always figured the "real" Kings Row (as opposed to what we see in the game) is meant to be.

Like some others in this thread, I have argued in the past that Atlas Park should have been primarily focused on smaller-scale, Art Deco-type architecture. I strongly disagree that the pre-revamp Atlas Park gave this impression at all; the buildings were nowhere near ornamental enough. Rather, old Atlas had the feel of U.S. cities that expanded in the '60's and '70's, with large, International-style buildings with minimal orientation and lots of exterior concrete. New Atlas, I feel, has a more Postmodern feel, with its exposed support trusses and glitzy windows, interspersed with old brick. The mention of London is interesting; while I hadn't ever thought of this before, new Atlas sort of reminds me of London, with older, smaller buildings interspersed haphazardly with odd, Postmodern skyscrapers.

Like Samuel Tow, I've long felt that Steel Canyon doesn't really live up to its name. I've argued in the All Things Art Building Edition thread that Steel should be primarily made up of postwar skyscrapers (International and Postmodern styles) with a couple of older Deco ones thrown in. This is the way many of the more built-up cities in the U.S. (at least those that had at least part of their growth before World War II) look. That brings me to this interesting insight:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow Back to Steel Canyon, what fails the zone so much is all the whitespace between the buildings. I haven't actually been in a major American city, but I get the impression that the various skyscrapers are a lot closer together. With these, there is so much room between them it feels less like a cityscape and more like a series of plazas with buildings plopped up around them. Kings Row feels a lot more realistic because it's basically paved streets, sidewalks and either buildings or fenced-off yards the rest of the way. No large areas dedicated to open, empty plazas.

I've noticed this, too, and I think it's due to two factors. First, Steel Canyon's design in terms of game environment design is more primitive that some of the newer zones. Cities in games at that time weren't as realistic as they are now, even in other parts of this game.

Second and more importantly, how close the buildings are depends on which "major American city" you mean. In the East and some places in the Midwest, where streets were laid out before the automobile era and much of the growth took place in the first half of the 20th century, when universal automobile ownership was just beginning, the buildings are indeed fairly close together. In cities that had their growth spurts after World War II, during the age of automobiles, streets were laid out with larger traffic in mind, and buildings were set further back. This is particularly noticeable in California ... where the devs live and work. There's a strong Californian ambience to a lot of the zones, particularly the Imperial City. (It's also apparent in the materials used in the buildings and their shapes, some of which couldn't hold up well in a harsher climate.) This architectural and urban planning style is all right for Praetoria City, which seems to be a newly built city located in a mild clime, but it's less appropriate for Paragon City, which has been around in one form or another for more than a century in a much harsher one.

I've also long felt that Nova Praetoria resembles Washington, D.C. (as befits a government town), particularly the area tagged "Penn Quarter" in the last few years.

This is one of my favorite subjects, and I could go on much longer, so I'll close now.

One of the things thast gives the impression of the skyscrapers being further part than they really are is the city architects' apparent love afair with overhangs - the footprint of almost every tall building is quite a bit smaller than the actual width of the rest of the building, creating wider ground level spaces than the air spaces.

On the notion of building spacing, two factors work against Steel Canyon:

1. This is supposed to be a "steel canyon" and it doesn't feel like it. It feels more like a steel desert with those weird spires. I get that some American cities are more open and spaced-out, but this is supposed to resemble a canyon of steel, concrete and glass, so it should be more crammed and imposing with buildings on all sides. It should be as though we're walking through a canyon of buildings.

2. The buildings are not spaced-out because of streets, they're spaced out with plazas. The old city architecture was basically a grid structure, with streets going in straight lines and making 90 degree turns, defining rectangles for buildings to go it. The trouble is that those rectangles were considerably bigger than the buildings themselves, so there's a lot of empty tile between the end of the sidewalk and where the building begins, and it's space typically used for nothing at all. I get that you can't just jam tall buildings into each other, but if the white space were filled with smaller buildings, I could still see it. But the way Steel Canyon comes off, it feels like someone took giant building blocks and just arranged them on the floor. They feel placed more so than built.

For most zones, I'd go with realism, but Steel Canyon needs to be denser with buildings.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Is the Jamaican coffeeshop "Mon Grounds" visible across the street from the center as it is in the comics? (ftp://ftp.coh.com/comics/topcow/comic_06.pdf p.25)

I also guess that Statesman won't be around to chat with Moodswing at the dedication, will he?

Hmmm... So, where the "Like" button?

They've been doing that since Issue 6