[Maycropolis 2025] 31. Angel Investments

Apologies for being a day late with this one, I'm afraid I was attending a wedding all day yesterday. Still - one late day out of 31 isn't too bad, and I'm glad to have made it to the finish line at last! I will at some point make a few more posts with detail shots of a few builds and an overall city layout, but for now let me just give my most earnest thanks to everybody who's been following along with this series throughout the month, and especially to those of you giving likes and comments. When May started, I was very deliberate in setting my goal as 'as many Micropolis modules as I can manage', because I didn't think I'd have it in me to do one every day - so even if I'm not thrilled with the quality of every single build, I'm still tremendously pleased to have proved myself wrong.

 

This is the headquarters of Angel Investments, one of Micropolis's oldest financial institutions. I wanted to do a massive 20th-century skyscraper as my final build, and I had quite a lot of fun reading about the 1916 Zoning Resolution in New York City that led to the development of the city's distinctive stepped-back skyscraper profile. I tried to follow the zoning resolution relatively closely - specifically, I followed the rules for a two-and-one-half-times district (since this is what the Financial District of NYC was zoned as at the time), which states that buildings are capped at street level to a height of 2.5 times the street width, and then for every 1 unit of distance they are stepped back from the street line, they may rise a further 5 units. There is an additional exception that allows for 25% of the lot to rise above the sloped envelope described above, and so indeed the octagonal tower in this build does rise a little bit higher than would otherwise be allowed.

 

I decided on the 'angel investors' idea for this build pretty early - I had a tablescrap that evolved to become the angelic corbels at the top of the spire, and so I decided to go for a black and gold Art Deco build. Then, funnily enough, I did some research, and found that an incredibly similar building (even including the angels) actually existed at one point! The Richfield Tower in LA was constructed in 1928 and demolished only forty years later - a shame, since it was really rather beautiful.

 

One final note: I had a couple of rendering issues with this build (most annoyingly, with part 5090 which appears to be too new for ldr_tools_blender to render), so there are a few part replacements that collide with each other - I assure you that there does exist a 'canonical' version of this build saved on my computer which is, I think, a fully legal and plausible build.

Done