Following on from a theme a recent blog post, here we are again with a new (and odd) source of inspiration. An ad for Cadre began appearing in several of my feeds – Facebook, Twitter, etc. Apparently Cadre is a sort of cloud-sourcing real estate investment group. Sounds interesting, kinda makes me wish I had a minimum of $100,000 to place into cloud-sourcing real estate. Alas, I don’t, but I did like the rhythm and design of the office building they use in their ad.

I let the image of this roll around in my head for a few days. Once I hit a roadblock with both real MOC’s I am currently building (waiting for parts from Bricklink), I started playing around in Studio again. A few days later, I had a concept for a couple of the middle floors pretty well worked out. I realized once I got into the design I was creating a perfect example of  a mediocre suburban office building circa 1982… a realization which tempered my enthusiasm for the model briefly, but I pushed on and decided to finish.

Ass I played with the design, I recalled a comment one of my architecture professors made in my second year studio classes – you can create an elegant simple rhythm by pushing and pulling elements

of a design – which is what the architect of this building was able to accomplish – every two floors flipped the floor plate design. The result is a push and pull effect featuring elements cantilevering every couple of floors – i.e. an elegant simple rhythm.

My creation is primarily a facade study, with no real interiors. It was intended to be a background building, thin by design with the base plate sitting against a roadway plate, which would accommodate a sidewalk and streetscape. My final model came to grand total of seven stories and about 1300 parts.

What are your thoughts on this one?

Footnote: If I do end up building this one, I am going to call it the Dorian since I began the design just before Dorian the hurricane approached the Bahamas and I’m finishing this post a week later as we await Dorian’s slow crawl up the Carolina coast.