Long absence, tall reason

You may be wondering about why it has been so long since I posted anything, simply put: school.  Immediately after our return from winter break my architecture professors handed us another assignment, design a tower for down town San Francisco.  It was to hold 80 young professional loft apartments, 60 apartments for transitional homeless to aid them in reintegrating with society, street front retail shops and at least one other "financial" program of my choice, for this I chose a 5-star restaurant and 18 high class hotel rooms.  To design this building we were given 20 days, that is now half past.  We have an intermediate peer review session tomorrow and I decided to take advantage of the work I have done so far and put it on here.  My apartments are 280 square feet each and alternate between lofts and transitional apartments in the middle floors, I didn't want to separate the programs to much to avoid a dominant hierarchy between them.  Attached is my 3D sketch model made in Rhino and the hotel and apartment floor plans.  Floor plans for the first three floors are in the works but aren't complete yet.  As of this moment the tower stands at 330 feet but that is without a roof or mechanical systems.  The project is located on an empty lot on Mission St adjacent to the new transport hub.

The Ferrari F2001 Formula 1 car is finally finished

The Ferrari F2001 Formula 1 car is finally finished. This project took much longer than it should have because of the Ferrari red paint dying half way through. A replacement bottle was purchased from Amazon and took a few days to get in; by then finals had arrived and the holidays soon after. I got a chance right after Christmas to finish it up and have a quick photo session. The final parts count was 129 including the rubber tires. Overall there were no fitment issues, even the most curved and warped body panels fit as they were intended and I didn't find any mis-shapen pieces. The suspension pieces are quite delicate but the model has two clear discs that attach underneath the solid under-tray. The weight of the car rests on these instead of the tires, thus saving the suspension from sagging. The decals were a bit finicky, they were some of the most delicate I have ever used. Some of the decals have to be done in a certain order, such as the FedEx logos which are placed on top of a white box included in another decal. I didn't catch this the first time and the main FedEx logos are out of place by a little. Two of the larger decals, white blocks for the spoiler, broke apart before I got the hang of it and I had to paint instead. On the whole I am very pleased with the detail of this kit but it is a Tamiya model so I had high expectations. I plan to continue with the history of Formula 1 series and build the Tamiya Lotus 25 Coventry Climax next, Stay posted for the start of that project soon. Other updates are that I re-started work on the map I was drawing and I have almost finished pulling everything together to set up a knife forge. Expect some exciting updates for the new year along with a few look backs to old projects.