The Campus Model

As part of its RoadShow the University of Auckland commissioned the construction of a computer based interactive guide to the courses, services and institutions that students may encounter during their term of study. One of the more exciting features of this RoadShow is a set of flythroughs of a three dimensional model of the Campus, put together by myself, here in the National Institute of Creative Arts & Industries own computer laboratory.

As much as it was an exercise in gratuitous presentation, embarked upon purely for the wowee value such manifestations of computer technology invariably evoke, it demonstrated what is possible here, in terms of the production, management, and use of large scale pieces of landscape/context integrated with small scale architectural models, as are now more regularly produced here by students for both the computer graphics and studio courses.

The Old Arts Building
The Old Arts Building and its various attachments, housing various administrative departments, Student Health and the BNZ.

The Library
The Library Building forms the core of the network of departmental and faculty libraries throughout campus.

Science
This horendous piece of concrete brutalism houses the myriad of laboratories, lecture theatres and offices that constitutes the Faculty of Science.

Education
The Fisher Building houses the head office of the Faculty of Education.

The Student Union
The Student Union complex during the early phases of modelling.

The Student Union complex seen from ground level.

A View from Afar
Looking down Grafton Gulley, an ethereal "Sky tower" rises through the haze.

A Plan View
A parallel projection of the model, concentrating on the area immediately surrounding the main campus.

The Pastoral University
The campus model, pretty much as it appears in the roadshow, the empty streetmap surrounding the campus gives one the impression of rolling fields.

A flight below Grafton Bridge...

A flight across the city campus...

The model base consists of a 6 sq. km area of central Auckland digitised as three dimensional data in New Zealand Map Grid coordinates (a reference system measured in metres east and north of some imaginary origin south west of the bottom of the South Island), and elevations above sea level. The data was acquired from DOSLI cadastral maps available at the Department of Planning. These supplied topological information in the form of 20m contours and assorted spot heights on a 1:25000 scale map. The results were suprisingly good.

The positioning and orientation of the buildings was taken from a map of the publicly accessible walkways and spaces composed by Jan Kelly from the cartography section of the Department of Geography. Her map supplied the footprints for the City Campus buildings and was derived from the KRTA map of the campus, which was composed with reference to a coordinate system based on the Mt Eden trig. The conversion from this to NZMG coordinates was fairly straight forward.

Each building or logical grouping of buildings was modelled separately in ArchiCAD. These models were generally fairly coarse, incorporating where possible signature type features to facilitate the reading or identification of the particular buildings. The models can be seen as caricatures, indicative of scale and appearance, but not really good enough to stand up to close scrutiny.