Behind the Scenes: University Hall

10/17/2017

Just like the title, today's blog intents to show some behind the scenes stuff about the digital restoration. I worked on this research project for about three and a half months. For the first two weeks, professor and I browsed around the University Archive for any "evidence" of the old building. It's like a detective work really since all the photos of the building are black and white, we had to read through the U of I Board of Trustee reports from around 1872 to find out about the materials when they first commissioned the construction. We then checked out the old construction drawings for references. Apparently, the University of Arkansas used the drawings of our University Hall to construct a building of their own called the Old Main, which served as a great reference for the depth of the relief and overhangs.

Interesting note: there's actually a building with the similar style in my hometown! It's the National Museum of Taiwan Literature. The building was constructed in 1916 under the Japanese Empire and was originally used as the government building. So what's the connection in all of this? It turned out that there was a movement for Japanese architecture students to study abroad at the U.K, and so they also brought back the Western classical revival movement to Japan, which eventually ended up in Tainan as well. The U.S was also influenced by the movement during that time, and that's how the University Hall got its design and why both Tainan and Champaign have similar buildings!

The exhibition space. You can see this part being restored in the video.

One of the floor plan drawings I used as a modeling reference.

Early progress showing all floors!

Adding windows and relief of the towers!

Modeling details of the clock tower! Since I only had one view as reference, a lot of the relief were incorrect during the first try. For example: the "ears" of the tower windows actually didn't look like that. I fixed it later on.

Towers are up! Each of the tower took about a week!

I hesitated a lot for the roof because the only reference I had was the old roof plan drawing so I wasn't sure how was it going to connect with the towers and the walls.