Less is more.

– Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

It’s time for some show and tell in this week’s post! Click on any image in this post to view a larger version of it.

This post starts off with a quote that has fewer letters than the name of the man who said it. Project Highrise visual design was highly influenced by Mies’s architecture and design philosophy. We’re based in Chicago where he spent the more prolific part of his career and there are many examples of his work in our fair city.

Recently, we’ve been working on several visual refinements to the game. First of all, we’ve implemented a new outer skin to the building. When designing the visuals for the exterior of a building in Project Highrise, we took Mies’s maxim quoted above to heart.

A key tenet of the architectural style championed by Mies is that the building’s structural elements should be sufficient in terms of decoration. We tried to follow that when creating the outer skin of our building. So the windows are simply framed by structural columns and the roof decoration is limited to the ventilation shafts.

Moving downward to the subterranean portion of a building….

There are also new support pylons that act as the foundation of your skyscraper. If you’re building an 80 story tall building, it’s important to make sure it’s well-anchored in bedrock. So we also included bedrock which you can see in the bottom of this image.

In an earlier Architect’s Notes, we talked about utilities and the pipe and wire infrastructure of a building in Project Highrise. In this rainy day image, you can see the conduit that brings electricity, telephone, cable TV, water and gas service into your building from the city’s utility grid.

Also, if you’ve ever seen one of Mies’s skyscrapers in person, one of their more striking features is their soaring glass-encased lobbies. One of the finest examples is the IBM Building here in Chicago. So of course we had to have glass lobbies to Project Highrise.

And finally, we’ve added clouds and did some refining of the day and night cycle. So we’ll leave you with an animated gif of a day swiftly rushing by. Click here or on the image to view a higher quality movie clip.