http://infinitespire.weblogger.com/

This proposal for the WTC memorial competition
(http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/), one of the 5200 that were eventually
submitted, is the brainchild of telecom entrepreneur/author and SETI
part-time worker Brian McConnell, from San Francisco. At the beginning of
2003, Brian, who sometimes dabbles with POV-Ray, recruited some people (pro
bono) to help with the visualisation of this project. Robert Becker, a
professional illustrator, did the watercolors, and I did the CG renderings
in POV-Ray, with some Rhino and Xfrog help. The site features a few of these

about this project at Oyonale in the near future, with some details. Note
that the main objective of the renders was to look good on the presentation
board: they needed to be clean, clear and not too detailed or realistic.
For obvious reasons, this project didn't make it in the final stage of the
competition, as the last thing New York needs is a 600m-high obelisk (the
"fallen headstones" part, however, could have been a starting point for a
real memorial). It was more meant to be an object of debate. The unfortunate
thing, however, was that there was a gag rule (to prevent self-promotion,
particularly from "big names" entrants) which meant no room for discussion
during the competition. The 8 finalists are more realistic/humble/low
key/appropriate than Brian's ambitious design (which seems to belong to the
tradition of unfeasable visionary architecture like the one from

http://expositions.bnf.fr/boullee/expo/7/indexacc.htm), but they also look a
lot like each other.
In any case, there were many interesting things and challenges in this
project, one of them being that the main building could be defined by a
single equation and rendered as an isosurface (it was finally created in SDL
as a mesh for speed reason). Actually, a lot of this project was
mathematically defined, and was ideal for POV-Ray. I spent a lot of time
looking at the map of Ground zero too. And if we had run out of render time,
we could have used some SETI machines!

G.

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