Maxis References

[Odainsaker 2,134]

On ‎12‎/‎25‎/‎2015 at 6:56 PM, JP Schriefer said:

I think I might have once again found this one, Maxis's Marshall Printing, as the American Stock Exchange Building at 86 Trinity Place in New York City's financial district.  This was formerly the New York Curb Exchange Building and later was the trading site for AMEX, a contemporary of the NYSE.

The Maxis recreation has some variations in the number of bays, the setbacking, and the ground floor.  However, the general size, the articulation of the windows and vertical pilasters, the shapes of topmost sculptures, and the Art Deco corner notching are a very close fit, and this huge close-up of the real building wonderfully shows those details.  Of course, Maxis's loose discrepancies are fairly large, many of these types of buildings share similar elements and patterns, and sometimes an architectural firm might do lesser-known variations on a successful design, but I'm fairly confident this is the right source.  The flagpole was enough for me.

I'll be honest, I cannot claim to have first spotted this, as @simcity4fan12 actually offhandedly mentioned it back in 2009 on @Francis90b's Bat Mill when Francis90b was making a detailed BAT of the AMEX, and, amusingly, many of us from this thread posted about this building in that thread.  I didn't even realize the connection then, and I even posted in that thread!  How so much work and knowledge gets buried and lost in the shuffle...this will just be the filing here for the Maxis References thread where we can see it in one place in and praise simcity4fan12 for his long ago find.  I've only stumbled across this again while using Google Earth Pro to inspect the neighboring Trinity Court Building (the building on the left in the image above).  To think that I once walked around and even photographed these buildings in real-life without knowing just what they were.

 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I didn't realize it hadn't been posted here, and of course it should. I should probably put an index on matches on the first page shouldn't I?

I've always liked the Maxis version but the original is better. It has some interesting and unconventional art deco detailing, and I love the bunny ear penthouses. 

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

11 hours ago, Odainsaker said:

I've only stumbled across this again while using Google Earth Pro to inspect the neighboring Trinity Court Building (the building on the left in the image above).

Ehhhh can I get excited about this little shiny phrase? If you know what I mean.

[Francis90b 748]

Quote

I think I might have once again found this one, Maxis's Marshall Printing, as the American Stock Exchange Building at 86 Trinity Place in New York City's financial district.  This was formerly the New York Curb Exchange Building and later was the trading site for AMEX, a contemporary of the NYSE.

 

That's precisely what it is, and I attempted modelling it , long ago and before having any clue about what i was doing :P.

I feel a bit thorn about where to stand concerning Maxis's version of it - for there are objective circumstances within the original building which would make it's rendition in any other form less straightforward than what it normally would be.

First of all, the original building was, built as a stock exchange - as such it possesses sprawling and tall trading floors at lower levels, making for an imposing appearence but severely limiting such design's useability as anything else, and these same floors extend all the way on the back, more than doubling the building's footprint into a georgian revival lowrise, to which the art decò midrise we see is actually a later addition.

Secondly, the building doesn't lend itself well to sc4 grid - it's art decò facade is roughly 38 mtrs wide, i.e. between 2 and 3 tiles wide without being any close to either lenght.Moreover the back of building has another non-standard lenght, in the range of 54-55 mtrs, and is non parallel to the front facade.

Designers must have picked it because of beautiful, majestic facade - the same reason as why i did, and selected to make it a CO$$, mayhaps as they needed some more of them.

They did away with the back lowrise, a sensible move given their goals, and they did away with trading floors, replacing them with a two floor lobby i find quite awkward and not very integrated with the rest of the building.

Furthermore, in the attempt to bring front facade within the two tiles limit, they cut it's composition by removing one of the middle bays; but that means the central section of the model's facade has an even number of bays/elements, something that wasn't really common in traditional styles, and was also avoided even in several early art decò designs.

Finally, there's the roughly gray/pale blue cladding material - i still have to see anything remotely resemling it in real life stone claddings, however it does it's job within sc4's universe...i would even say i feel it refreshing compared to much of the rest of SC4's colour palette :P.

 

So i think it's not a bad attempt, not because there's anything good to write about it, but because the material they had to work with was relatively difficult.

I'm wondering what it could have been if they decided to make it as a stock exchange out of it, maybe in place of the wall street imitation they actually delivered...

At any rate, it's still one of my favourite buildings in Maxiscape :P.

 

 

[JP Schriefer 5,590]

A little off-topic here..

@Francis90b I was taking a look at your thread and you definitely have the skills to BATting. Don't you have the will to continue your projects? They look very good.

[nRVOUS 333]

Not sure if this was posted before but heres a pretty obvious inspiration for the Grand Hotel.

135 east 57th street in New York City

[nRVOUS 333]

Not a perfect match but i noticed this maxis building reminds me of the Conrad hotel in Tokyo.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Conrad+Tokyo/@35.6630798,139.7643643,481a,35y,264.49h,36.4t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x60188bc318ea4495:0x5ced351bec660e2!8m2!3d35.6631345!4d139.7612598

 

[korver 27,685]

Found this a while back and thought it looked suspiciously familiar to a certain SC3KU building.. Searched everywhere and I haven't seen it mentioned before, so I thought I'd post it here.

Haus des reisens, Alexanderplatz, Berlin

Also of note: signage on the back includes "Reisebüro".. notice the "Euro Büros" signage on the SC3KU one.

 

Kuruptz Inc., European tileset

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Something I came across on 3d Warehouse looked too familiar, so I looked at it more carefully on Google Earth Pro:

Look at the shape of the base...

SimCity 2000's "Corporate Headquarters," the beloved KSIM Building, is very likely San Francisco's One Market Plaza.  The twin tower heights are not perfectly reproduced, but counting floors on the Maxis version reveals they did maintain a small height difference.  Additionally, while the Maxis version added corner bevels, the number of bays on the towers are similar.  The Google Earth model perhaps shows too much darkly reflective glass, but a real-world photo shows a much better ratio of dark glass to white structure that finally convinced me.

Wiki tells us One Market Plaza at 1 Market Street was completed in 1976, with the taller tower named Spear Tower and the shorter named Steuart Tower.

Thanks to JaWood, this building made it to SimCity 4 as the KSIM Network Headquarters, and thanks to Quad Rioter, it has entered Cities: Skylines as the Stalwart.  Interestingly, each iteration is an increasingly divergent, or evolving, morph.

Attached as an older portion of One Market Plaza is the historic Southern Pacific Building, which has many loose similarities to a truncated commercial building in SimCity 3000.  However, those similarities are perhaps too generic to be definitively called.  The height and style is correct, but the breadth is wildly off.

[Jasoncw 11,840]

I'm bumping this thread because of the SimCity 3000 Birthday project.

 

[Don Miguel 560]

It looks like Kong Tower from SimCity 3000 is combination of several buildings.

 

 

The cupola on top looks like a gold version of the ones on top of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York.

 

The parts drawn in blue are from the Shell Building in San Francisco.

 

The parts in yellow are based on the Pacific Bell Building:

 

And if you notice, Kong Tower has two sets of gold eagles, both presumably based on the Chrysler Building.  The ones with the wings on top and the pointy ones on the bottom.

 

 

 

 

[edwardjeria 503]

1 hour ago, Don Miguel said:

Parece que Kong Tower de SimCity 3000 es una combinación de varios edificios.

 

 

La cúpula en la parte superior parece una versión dorada de las que están encima del hotel Waldorf Astoria en Nueva York.

 

Las partes dibujadas en azul son del Edificio Shell en San Francisco.

 

Las partes en amarillo se basan en el Edificio Pacific Bell:

 

Y si lo nota, Kong Tower tiene dos juegos de águilas doradas, ambos probablemente basados en el Edificio Chrysler. Los que tienen las alas en la parte superior y los puntiagudos en la parte inferior.

 

 

 

 

wooooaaaa what a good eye

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Fantastic!

[Don Miguel 560]

Here's another one from SimCity 2000.

 

It looks like the San Francisco Hilton:

 

 

 

[Odainsaker 2,134]

On ‎4‎/‎14‎/‎2016 at 4:02 PM, Thin White Duke said:

Another one from Cities: Skylines. The Aquarium is a near perfect copy of the Osaka aquarium in Japan.

 

Having just fired up SimCity 3000 Unlimited today, I saw that this building was also used by Maxis as the Asian building set's Toy Store:

The original aquarium is already a big building, and, like much of the SC3000 Asian set, it has here acquired a few more stories.  Ironically, Maxis made it a diminutive 1x1 lot.

 

__________

 

Some housekeeping from other threads:

 

@AndisArt posted this image of the SimCity 3000's Stoclet Apartments on the SimCity 3000 Building References thread:

Though I always thought the SC3000 building was stark and ungainly, the real-world Palais Stoclet in Brussels is one of the most beautiful homes in the world and a masterpiece of Vienna Secession architecture, with art pieces inside by Gustav Klimt.  I feel like this Maxis reference was spotted shortly after SC3000 came out, but fan webpages from that time are slowly evaporating, so I'll post it again here.

I wonder if these young rebel artists in the era of Emperor Franz Josef ever thought one of their houses would be in a colorful video game!

A bit of personal admission...I love the Vienna Secession era and use Otto Wagner's drawings as one of many models to emulate.  Check out how Otto Wagner foretold the future in his architecture...even his Viennese contemporary Sigmund Freud would be amazed by the similarities!  What would the modern world have looked like had the freeform, avant-garde dynamism of pre-war Art Nouveau Vienna held sway rather than the reactionary attitudes that instead brought two world wars.  Meanwhile, a certain little soon-to-be corporal with a funny mustache was revolted by the bourgeois cosmopolitanism and "degenerate art" he saw, and he also didn't take to kindly to his drawings being rejected by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

 

At the behest of @Jasoncw I need to duplicate this mention of the SimCity 3000 Unlimited Asian tileset's Bluerise Plaza from @AndisArt's SimCity 3000 BAT Project:

I'm pretty sure Bluerise Plaza is based on the Crystal Tower (クリスタルタワー) in Osaka, Japan.  It is one of the landmarks of Osaka Business Park (the OBP), a tight cluster of skyscrapers near Osaka Castle that dramatically rose up in the late 1980s and early 1990s--just in time to inspire Maxis.

SimCity 3000 obviously tweaked and exaggerated many of the buildings used as inspiration, with the Crystal Tower here getting taller, narrower, and even intersecting itself.  Still, the angled folds at the top and the thin columns at the base are a match.  Actually, even the entrance is close to correct.

 

__________

 

@Don Miguel  Ooo, great find.  I was always wondering if that could be the one, but your Google Earth shot looks to be right on.

 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

ahhh, the finds have been pouring in lately.

Interestingly I was just looking at the mansion yesterday!

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Gee, after wafting romantically after Otto Wagner and looking again at his drawings, I realized SimCity 3000's Performing Arts Center...

...likely came from Wagner's drawings of the Kaiser Franz Josef-Stadtmuseum, a proposed but never built city history museum originally conceived in 1900 for Vienna's Karlsplatz.

SC3000's version is only 2x2 , while Wagner's would have been much more grandly Habsburg Imperial in scale.

The Maxis building sheds most of the ornate decorations, lofty sculptures, and flanking columns, making it more modern looking than Wagner's classicizing Secessionism.  There are a number of versions and studies for this project, which reached the level of a city design competition pitting the new avant-garde against conservative historicism.  I might not have recognized it but for this model of an even more grandiose version of the proposed museum, this time showing the intended color scheme of a white building with a reddishly gilded dome.  That gaudy alternative model was meant to assuage the elites, who were not fond of Wagner's starker, more streamlined version with its boldly colored and stylized dome buttress flares.  They would have been absolutely aghast at Maxis's even less ornate version with all the statuary removed.

Otto Wagner's grand conception for Vienna's Karlsplatz was never realized, but he did manage to design and see built the Karlsplatz Stadtbahnhof, a tiny former stop on the Vienna Stadtbahn whose architectural charm has made it a signature city landmark.  You can just barely make out the station and its trench in the Karlsplatz aerial drawing below, while the Stadtmuseum would be just on the left of the Baroque domed Karlskirche.

Imagine what the full grand plan might have looked like if completed.  A mock study façade was begun.  German Wiki says later versions of what became called the Wiener Stadtmuseum project were finally abandoned in 1921 after the defeat of World War I and the ruinous breakup of Austria-Hungary brought economic calamity and left Vienna as an imperial capital without an empire.  A modern Wien Museum was eventually built in Karlsplatz in the Euromodern International Style.

 

[T Wrecks 10,209]

Wow, now that is a find. And despite all artistic liberties, suspiciously many core elements and similarities are right there IMO.

[edwardjeria 503]

Good jood guys

[AsimPika3172 1,136]

Nice Maxis buildings with the real life buildings! 

[Odainsaker 2,134]

Two more from SimCity 3000 Unlimited:

 

T.C. Wong's House is Sir Richard Rogers' Kabuki-chō Project Hayashibara 5th Building (歌舞伎町プロジェクト 林原第5ビル) in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

(Image from Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners)

I confess I first pointed out this building way back when SC3000 was first released on a similar fansite thread, but those ancient threads have long since evaporated.  Worse, while I remembered the building was in Tokyo, I could not remember the building's name or its architect, and I have been pounding my head and scouring images of projects by Sir Norman Foster and Renzo Piano.  I had to play the architecture version of Six Degress of Kevin Bacon:  Renzo Piano --> Centre Pompidou --> Richard Rogers --> Kabuki-chō.  How could I forget Sir Richard Rogers!  I was once such a fanboy I was even making Richard Rogers scurks:

 Sir Richard Rogers, I do still love you!  XOXOX

@Glenni reminds us that SC3000's T.C. Wong's House has been recreated for SimCity 4, and I feel like I once downloaded it either on the STEX or the LEX, but, errr, I can't remember who made it or what they named it.  Time for that Kevin Bacon game again!

 

__________

 

Import Export Inc. is the Shanghai Customs House (江海关大楼), a major landmark on the Bund whose tower is often picturesquely paired with the the dome of the neighboring former Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Corporation.  "Import Export"..."Customs"...clever, Maxis, very clever.

(Photo by Andrew Selkirk from ancientchina.org.uk)

(Photo by Yang Wei Chen on Love 2 Fly)

I'm sure this reference must have been pointed out by someone once before, but if so it has been lost to internet evaporation.

The 1927 art deco tower comes from Palmer and Turner, a Hong Kong-based firm who did numerous monumental buildings of the British colonial era in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai.  The customs house on the waterfront in the former British zone is loosely inspired by the Royal Liver Building on the waterfront of sister port city Liverpool, while the clock and bells are directly modeled after Big Ben in London and originally played the familiar "Westminster Quarters."  Nowadays, it plays an audio recording of the Cultural Revolution's "The East is Red."  Wiki tells us this is the largest clock in Asia, though Maxis opted not to completely leave off the clock on their building.  Maxis did, however, also include both the Liver Building and Big Ben as landmarks for SC3000, putting a building and its own direct inspiration together in the game.  Yes, the growable has two landmark parents!

Back in another, now romanticized era, the Great Powers carved out chunks of China as extraterritorial concessions, within which they built lofty trading and banking halls.  Old China outside was falling into chaotic civil war, invasion, and revolution, but life in the foreign concessions under the protection of the gunboats offered a semblance of laissez-faire capitalist prosperity, even if they were all in actuality surrounded.

Those British expatriates who survived the war, the civil war, and the revolution fled back to Hong Kong, building it into a tiger economy of skyscrapers.  With the modern reopening of mainland China, the glittering image of Hong Kong's forest of skyscrapers has spread back to Shanghai, and now New China rises far above the old, with much of it astoundingly sprouting up in the just the past twenty years:

Maxis and EA must have had this very view of Lujiazui across the river from the Bund in mind when they made the promotional and cover art for the Unlimited and World Edition versions, for look who is at the bottom right:

 

[Don Miguel 560]

Great job everyone on finding these!  Here is another one I found from SimCity 3000.  They are called Red Brick Apartments and it's based on the Terminals Building in Chicago.

 

[DavidDHetzel 1,816]

I think this may have been mentioned but Paull Inc is the TImes Square building in Rochester

 

 

 

[Photovoltaic Array 97]

A well-known one, The "Theatre Square" from SimCity 2000 was based on the Orinda Theatre Square, the former headquarters of Maxis. Although it's been mentioned elsewhere on this forum I don't think it's been mentioned in this thread yet.

 

[Don Miguel 560]

Happy New Year everyone!    Here are two more.  One from SimCity 3000 and one from SimCity 4.

 

 

 

SimCity 3000 -  Insurance Plaza.  This one is actually 475 Sansome St in San Francisco.   The top of the building isn't quite a match but the facade and the features on the "second floor" match up pretty clearly.  I wish I had known about this back when I did it as a BAT. 

 

And one for SimCity 4...

 

 

Wong Insurance is really 731 S Plymouth Court in Chicago, a residence center for Columbia College.   I found this one fooling around in Google maps for something completely unrelated and when I came across it, I thought...  hmm this looks familiar.

 

 

 

[Don Miguel 560]

 

Futa Consulting looks an awful lot like the Knickerbocker Trust Building in New York City,  which has long been demolished to make way for an extension of One Wall Street.  The features are very similar.

 

 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

Great work!

[Don Miguel 560]

There was a building I liked in SimCity 3000 called Smiley Sons and Daughters Foundation.

 

 

It's based on 2 Harrison St in San Francisco, originally built for Hills Brothers Coffee.

Maxis simplified it a bit by removing the big tower in the middle and made a couple of other minor changes, but this building appears to be the inspiration.

 

 

 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

That one was always one of my favorites. It's interesting to see where the elevated plaza came from.

[Wren 12]

On 5/5/2015 at 8:43 PM, IDS2 said:

You know, it's interesting that you mention that! I actually live about midway between downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul, but I'll admit this one still took me by surprise. I just now remembered that the particular tileset you have pictured (in my game it's just called "tileset1," so I don't know what it's really called) has a couple of Minneapolis buildings within it. I haven't played SC2K in a couple of years, but I just had a huge flashback to my childhood when I realized that both 225 South Sixth (Capella Tower) and the Wells Fargo Tower, both in Minneapolis, were part of this tileset. Look no further than the image you posted - the building in the foreground appears to be a SCURK derivative of 225 South Sixth. I'd open up my game and try to get a closer screenshot of this one along with the Wells Fargo Tower, but unfortunately I left my game at home. 

 

I'm not entirely convinced that the other building in the image is the Jackson Tower, but I'll admit there are many similarities between the two. It's possible that it's just harder for me to tell because the shape of 225 South Sixth is so distinctive and easy to recognize even in pixel art format, while the Jackson Tower is a much more generic pomo residential tower. It may be just a coincidence, but I won't rule it out until I can dig up my game and look it at up close.

I'm the creator of the three SCURK buildings, which might have been included in various tilesets. The foreground building was indeed inspired by 225 South Sixth which I thought was called the Towle Building, but now it's Capella Tower. The one on the right was based on Jackson Tower. It's specifically part of the Galtier Towers (or Galtier Plaza), but it looks like they are called Cray Towers (or Cray Plaza) now. I was born in St. Paul and grew up in West St. Paul, so buildings around the twin cities were often used in my SCURK art. The building on the left, just for completeness, is based on a building from the SimCity 2000 box art. The original tilesets are still hosted at http://www.sc3000.com/sc2000/scurk/fulltils.cfm and are part of the Renew 95 tileset specifically. There's another Minneapolis tower in the Renew USA tileset, which is based on Wells Fargo Center as mentioned. There are others I made based on real world buildings, but posted those may need to be an exercise for another time. ;-)