This project has been on my drafting table for the better half of a decade. It reflects both of my family homes and has been my constant tinkering over the years I've spent away from the places it reminds me of. The energy that this community has offered drove me to polish some lingering details and turn my lens on the piece for critique.

This building is made of cardboard from a cereal box, a pizza box, matting board, blister plastic, school glue, blue insulation foam scraps, a swatch of fine mesh fencing, a three dollar artificial fern and a radio knob. The working light was wired by my friend Felix with a car adapter jack which was pretty slick.

I meticulously cut and lay bricks to create a textured surface with mortar outside of the brick face. I've got a penchant for sloppy workmanship, perhaps it's the old buildings I had the marvel of childhood in, perhaps it's that I cut my teeth on scratch building ork vehicles, but I'm fairly certain it's just cause crumbly bricks are cool.

In the past using blister plastic to create windows yielded fogged results. Make sure to use a thin bead of super-glue applied to the edge of the glass, or the pressure will cloud the window with overspill. If you have the patience, skip the insta-set- this fogs the plastic as well. Using my trusty pin vice and exact-o knife I riddled and shattered some windows before installing them. Variety beats clutter in any design.

I trimmed boughs of the fake plastic plant and made the ivy chase the sunlight out of the rubble and into the ruined roof and walls. I'd initially had a single vine of ivy, but when I returned home this year over the holidays I saw that my parent's brick warehouse had grown an entire quarter of the building in live ivy. A bit guarded of my precious hand lain brick work, I resisted engulfing the building in ivy, tempting as it was.

On the first floor, made visible by the loading dock, I built some doors and corners and textures beneath to patch up some of the clunky interior architecture. The second story was a playable surface, and while you could fit a dreadnaught under the first story by the loading dock, it'd be unwieldy to lift a wired building mid-game. So I made the second story very accessible, with the rubble hill leading up to the wide entrance, and an infantry scale door and fire escape on the back. I'd left a shattered floor so that the light could reach two stories from the top down, but for playability sake I replaced this potential exit point with a mesh and girder structure, so the light still works on two stories and there's no escape.

The HVAC unit on the top of the building was given some much needed industrial texture, really just an excuse to trap rust in the nooks and crannies. I mounted a radio knob to top as it looks like a scale roof turbine vent.

Initially I'd had this mounted to a tile base, but it was quite heavy and didn't fit on gaming boards with it's own city block attached. The building stands on it's own, but I may build up a ravine around the side with the fire escape to create a move leveled playing field against the building's second story occupants. Don't want the squatters to have all the comforts of home.