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Penobscot building

Please leave a vote or comment if you download this asset! This is a RICO office building(6x6)

About the model
This project started in august 2016. A year later and it's finally done. Some 150 hours went alone in the modelling and probably another 30-40 in texturework, lod and finalizing the model. In february I completed The Dorilton and at that time it was by far the most complicated model I had done. This one took even more effort (and sometimes frustation). The (greater) Penobscot Building is a building in Detroit and it's my long time favourite skyscraper. A building that should be in every skyline!

You can always follow my assetcreations on the Simtropolis forums: http://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/68841-darfs-buildings-the-dorilton-new-victory-theater/ or on sketchfab: https://sketchfab.com/sannie01

This model has a staggering 20240 tris and a 2048x1024 texture , with a diffuse, normal, alpha, illumination and specularmap.This model has a custom LoD, which is about 358 tris with a 512x512 texture, with a diffuse, specular, alpha and illumination map.

RICO
This building is RICO enabled. It will provide 4500 workers as an office building. I recommend using the realistic population mod, this will calculate the amount of occupants in the building.


About the building
The 47-story Greater Penobscot Building towers over Campus Martius, an Art Deco masterpiece that has dominated the city’s skyline for more than 80 years.

The building is named after a tribe of American Indians in New England. The name Penobscot means “the place where the rocks open out.” Simon J. Murphy, who made a fortune as a lumber baron before coming to Detroit, spent his youth working on the Penobscot River in Maine. As the nation moved west, Murphy’s lumber empire moved with it, and he settled in Detroit. When it came time to name his new building, his thoughts returned to his roots.

There are actually three Penobscot buildings. The first is the 13-story building Murphy erected in 1905. It was joined by a 24-story tower in 1916. The third, the 47-story tower known as the Greater Penobscot, was built at a cost of $5 million.

The 47-story Greater Penobscot towers over Campus Martius, an Art Deco masterpiece that has dominated the city’s skyline for more than 80 years. It was the eighth-tallest building in the world when it informally opened on Oct. 22, 1928, and the fourth-tallest in the United States. At 565 feet, it remained the king of Detroit’s skyline until 1977, when it was surpassed by the 729-foot Renaissance Center. It has since been demoted to the number three in town.

The building’s formal opening was held Jan. 14, 1929 — less than a month before the death of William H. Murphy, son of the man who erected the first of the three Penobscots.

The architect Wirt C. Rowland, of the prominent Smith Hinchman & Grylls firm based in Detroit, designed the Penobscot in an elaborate Art Deco style in 1928. Clad in Indiana Limestone with a granite base, it rises like a sheer cliff for thirty stories, then has a series of setbacks culminating in a red neon beacon tower. Like many of the city's other Roaring Twenties buildings, it displays Art Deco influences, including its "H" shape (designed to allow maximum sunlight into the building) and the sculptural setbacks that cause the upper floors to progressively "erode".

The opulent Penobscot is one of many buildings in Detroit that features architectural sculpture by Corrado Parducci. The ornamentation includes American Indian motifs, particularly in the entrance archway and in metalwork found in the lobby. At night, the building's upper floors are lit in floodlight fashion, topped with a red sphere.

The building's architect, Wirt C. Rowland, also designed other Detroit skyscrapers, such as the Guardian Building and the Buhl Building, in the same decade.

There is an urban legend that the building’s 100-foot tower with its winking red orb was once used as a port for a dirigible. In truth, this “blazing ball of fire,” as one newspaper article described it at the time, was simply an aviation beacon. These days, the tower and its sometimes-blinking red light are simply for decoration. The orb, which is 12 feet in diameter, was first turned on when the building opened 79 years ago and can be seen 40 miles away — when it’s working, anyway.

The building has not been without controversy over its eight decades. For example, those are indeed swastikas adorning the exterior of the Penobscot, but they weren’t put there by Nazis. The swastikas are part of the building’s American Indian motif and symbolize sun worship. Suggestions during World War II to get rid of them were discarded. The swastikas on the Penobscot also are angled differently than those used in Nazi Germany.

Changes
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