Antonino Frazzitta has been hard at work digitally reconstructing the University of Birmingham’s old main library for the ‘Walking with Hall’ project. We are using this to think about Hall’s legacy at the University of Birmingham and some of the major changes that have been made to campus in the decades since his time here. Read about out his progress here:
I began with pictures of the old library: we found some architectural blueprints in the University archives (Cadbury Research Library), and I used Google Earth and found some pictures in online archives to try to get a feel for the shape of the building. We didn’t find much material online, so we only had a few perspectives of the library to work with and to figure out the size of the building – mostly from the top and three-quarters. The model is my interpretation of the building – I had to fill in the gaps wherever the images and floor plans I had to work with were unclear or lacking certain perspectives.
I used Blender 3.5.0 to shape the 3D model and Photoshop to make the crests.
I paid special attention to the crests that are on top of the building, as they are still on campus where the building used to be and feature in ‘Walking with Hall’. These had to be especially accurate and so were handmade.
The next step will be to understand the textures of the building – I will need to study the pictures again and see what the materials of the walls and ceilings and windows look like, to give these details colour and texture.
The whole process is interesting to me because you start from really basic shapes and questions – how long each side is, how many floors and windows, and so on – then as you form the building in more detail you begin to understand more of its history. The evolution of the building over time shows up in these details: working with the blueprints, you see how the library was extended and used in different ways over time. Then the questions become more about how campus life might have changed with each stage of the library’s development and its demolition.
