The Wonder Years

This is my first attempt at gathering coherent thoughts on why it is that I choose to model buildings using Sketchup. To get to that story I guess it begins when I was a child growing up in the small town of De Kalb, Texas. A town of a whopping 1900 people at the time ( it has since decreased by about 200) and only a mere 40 miles from the larger city of Texarkana. My fascination of architecture began at looking at the old buildings in town and wondering who built them and why were there so many in such bad shape? I wanted to explore more on the subject when my parents told me that they were in fact from a different time some as early as the late 1800's. For me as a child I couldn't believe that something so old could exist! ( Imagine my surprise when I found out there are buildings much older haha)... Anyway, I digress. The occasional trip to the downtown area of Texarkana and even more rarely a visit to Dallas, Texas was an amazing eye opening experience for some reason or another. How did the buildings get so big? Some are much older than others. What is the history of the older ones? The very first building I wanted to know more about was the tallest building in Texarkana. The 10 story McCartney Hotel.

Yep.. there it is. I couldn't contain my wonder and excitement when I saw this building. It doesn't look like much today but it was a marvel for the city when it was completed. To my surprise most people in town had never seen or heard of this building! Shocking! How can you live in a city and not know the tallest building in that city? Much less not even know the name of the building. I really couldn't explain how frustrated that made me and it still does to this day. Of course the old timers knew. When I asked my grandparents they filled me with tales from the early days. Ya know... when railroad was king and all the shopping was done downtown? My grandmother pulled out the old photo album and had several of downtown Texarkana. She had been a guest in this hotel a few times and told me how wonderful it was and she also told me how bad it got before it finally closed in the mid 70's. Her last trip there she informed me of a strange smell throughout the building and how the guests were a bit on the rougher side of town. I wanted to do something about it......

 

Doing something about it! ( Well... sort of )

So we fast forward to sometime in 2008. I was already familiar with Google Earth ( many days in highschool and the Army of getting on and trying to find my truck in the driveway ) . I am not sure as to when I first noticed the 3D buildings layer but was well aware of how cool it was to look at things from a different perspective and to see cities in a totally new and dynamic way! I wanted to get my current city  of Texarkana with the program but how... This was a frustrating event. I had no idea how to begin so I Internet searched "3D building in Google Earth", found Sketchups download, and began with a very crude model of the McCartney Hotel. That model never made it to the 3D Warehouse as I was totally frustrated and didn't know the first thing about creating such a thing. To me it resembled a giant grey box with a few crooked rectangles for windows. I decided that maybe I should start with something a bit more simplistic. Sketchup could wait another year or two.....

 

K.I.S.S.

So in the Fall of 2010 I decided to model a small feed and seed store that was just recently renovated into a bar and grill. It was the Hopkins Ice House ( formally Hopkins Feed and Seed) pictured on the left here. I went downtown and took all the pictures and was confident that those YouTube instructional videos were going to work. Why hadn't I thought of this in 2008??? I returned home and played the YouTube vid in a separate window beside my sketchup window and step by step carved the grey block into a work of art.  Now besides hiding the edges and making the thumbnail look more appealing this is the first model I ever uploaded and remains unchanged. I crafted the thumbnail by going to Sketchup Island by Zoungy and looking at his model presentation tips. Don't let the pic fool you!!! It is a crude model measured to what I'm capable of today but at this time it was an amazing feat. My first model!

Realizing the dream.

After such an amazing experience with modeling Hopkins, I decided to take on the massive project of doing all of downtown Texarkana. Many more small models followed the one above. To include my all time favorite The McCartney Hotel. Most of my early models of downtown Texarkana have seen many revisions and were not always as pretty as they are now. Some still are in need of a revision or two but overall I am satisfied. My first model to request adding to a collection was Union Station. I had finally worked up the nerve to request Zoungy for an add to the Golden Age of Rail collection. It took a few days and I got his reply... "Looks great- try editing out the cars on the wall and it will be even better." Or something along those lines.... haha. He was right. I needed to take the extra time to make my models the best they could be for presentation. Wow, was this a hard thing to master at first... but I got there and before long it Union Station was sitting in the coolest collection I'd seen. It began getting all kinds of ratings and views and I now needed to again update all of my models the same way. Getting rid of light posts and cars became priority number one. Before long I had amassed enough models to create my own collection calling it Texarkana, USA.

What the future holds?

Since creating Texarkana USA I have been approached by several folks interested in taking this hobby of mine to the next step. From wanting to start a business to new business owners asking me to do renderings of what their vision of the proposed project hope to look like. With the uncertainty of the sale of Sketchup to Trimble I don't really know what the future holds as far as continuing to model. Ive been able to overcome and adapt to many challenges that have presented themselves while taking on more elaborate models. My fascination with bringing the world to those that may not have the luxury of travel, or just the curious, continues to grow. It is my hope to reignite the local areas passion for downtown by educating those who care about our rich history we once celebrated in Texarkana, USA and opening up new doors for redevelopment.

Thanks for reading,

 Josh