Street Sections

Street Sections show scale, activity and the types of activity you might see on a street. I've been making a few of these using Auto CAD and Illustrator.  The section below was one of the first ones that I learned to make. Just sticking with plain black and white, and simple images can yield some pretty effective results.This section was created based on a sketch, some simple standard dimensional estimates, and a basic understanding of CAD and Illustrator.

The location of the sketch below is from a stretch of East Market Street, Philadelphia.

As time went on I incorporated more details and tools from Adobe creative suite to create another section for a studio project pictured below. This section was created for a proposed industrial section in Mumbai, India. The area was intended to blend vital infrastructure for the Island City area, while incorporated public access similar to Deer Island, Massachusetts.

 Personally, I think this example has too much detail as a section, which takes away from the real information that its trying to convey.  However I think it fit within the context of the style of work we were publishing.

I think the first example, although simple, better conveys the dimensions and components of the street, as well as the edges. On the other hand, it could use a little bit of color and life.  The example below however was a great opportunity to learn as many options as possible in AutoCAD, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

As one continue to work on sections more and more, everyone eventually develops a style of their own. Personally I think I prefer something that leans more simplistic.  I've dug up another example, which I made very early on from a sketch of the pedestrian street, St. Albans Place in Philadelphia. (It was also one of the filming locations for the Sixth Sense.) I would probably change several of the details such as the labeling, but I think overall I like the basic black line work, with just a little color and life.

Hopefully I'll have the chance to do some more on occasion in my career.

(I'd like to point out that none of these examples include bike lanes. Two of these sections were based on sketches of existing roads. The following section coming up was based on an industrial area proposed in Mumbai, which likely a special exception in the world when it comes to planning for bikes.)

Constructing 3D site models.

I am currently going through some of the introductory aspects of site planning. The process has shown how useful it is to create a 3D model in order to gain some insight into the scale of an area and its surroundings.

As an exercise I am studying the area at 11th and Market, which is currently the site of the proposed East Market development currently under construction:

I quickly took the building footprints layer and through a series of steps exported the layers from GIS to Sketchup. I then just extruded the layers up to the total building heights. Sketchup is pretty amazing and with a little more time, you can really make some great 3D renderings of a concept. This model was a quick, simple example to create a sense of scale for the area. (For city hall, I went ahead and grabbed a previously built model, that had some finer details of the building from Sketchup's model warehouse and scale it into this model.)

In addition to the 3D model that you can zoom in and view, I also placed the building footprints into Auto CAD, and laid out a template to send to our laser cutter. A number of layers were set up to score the building footprints in the base, and also cut out a number of layers of the footprints themselves to glue and stack on one another.  Pictured below are a few photos of the before and after process of creating the model from 1/16" chipboard.