Introduction
Building style tilsets are one of the most powerful tools for controlling growables in SC4, along with wealth and zoning density. Yet they also seem to be the most-underutilized.The biggest difficulty to making a historically-realistic city in SC4---other than finding the right BATs and lots---is getting growable lots to grow in coherent and useful tilesets.
Understanding Building Style Sets
How can, and should, tilesets be used to maximize their impact? Two schools of thought seem to have emerged, each focusing around the cryptic designation by Maxis of the original sets, with a “city + date” format, yielding "Chicago 1890", "New York 1940", and "Houston 1990". The fourth, "Euro-Contemporary", was added in the Rush Hour expansion. But what do they mean?
Model 1: Building Sets as Geographic Regions
It seems at some point early on in the custom content era for SC4, the idea arose that style tilesets were primarily a geographic designation. This was the case in SC3K, with its stunningly varied American, European, and Asian tilesets. (More cynically, perhaps ambitious BAT creators just wanted their work to grow all the time, but you will still frequently find growable buildings listed as growing under all four tilesets.)
The primary game-play advantage of such usage is that it allows a player to be able to build up to four different regions (each with their own distinct but homogeneous look) simultaneously, without having to change growable building files in and out (though likely still having to switch universals such as terrain mods, water mods, street mods, etc.)
Weaknesses of the Regional/Geographic Model
There are several theoretical and practical drawbacks to the geographic model, outlined here:
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1.) It doesn't reflect the original architectural usage by Maxis.
- Maxis' reference buildings for Chicago came from Chicago, NYC, Richmond, Virginia etc. For, NYC from NYC and California, etc.
- The forum thread "Maxis References" sought to find the many buildings across the United States used as reference models for each tileset. Though many of the photo links are deprecated as of 2019, the text offers evidence that geography was not a major consideration.
- The examples chosen are not especially indicative of regional styles; indeed most of the buildings that dominate the original tileset could equally be at home in New York as in Los Angeles.
- 2.) It isn't useful for producing historically-layered cities. Under such a model, each city region gets one tileset, which applies without distinction within it.
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3.) In the United States, capturing the regional diversity with the three chosen cities is relatively redundant if not pointless (at least as with the original sets). For those not familiar with American architecture, regional differences do exist, but with some exceptions are usually more nuanced and in the details. By and large, they are nowhere near as pronounced by distance as in Europe. Even by 1900, buildings in Washington, DC might resemble buildings in St. Louis might resemble buildings in San Francisco and Vancouver.
- After the colonial periods had subsided and a national identity had gradually been established, stylistic decisions and movements were often region- or nationwide, with historic tradition and taste occasionally invoked (such as the prominence of Mission Revival in California or the English Colonial Revival in Virginia.
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Smaller factors include climate and local materials;
- climate is largely limited to details, such as whether buildings have front porches (used more in warmer climes) or not, flat roofs (useful in arid regions) or not; whether malls and stadiums are indoors or outdoors;
- local materials was largely negated by the ability to ships building materials by railroad and barge. The result was that a town in the middle of the Great Plains grasslands could still get lumber, and works such as the Empire State Building were built with limestone from Indiana, some 750 mi away.
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Most of the differences in historic building stock--i.e. why the entire city may look different (other than terrain and flora)--are a matter of the timing of the building booms a city underwent, the amount of wealth and people that accumulated, and the availability of land to build on.
- Wealth and density (a factor of land availability) are already factored as different variables in the game model.
- As for building booms: if one controls the eras (via era-based tilesets), and one controls the ability to rapidly grow a city (by the SC4 simulator), and one already can control for wealth and density (see above), then one can reasonably and powerfully model many cities in the United States and Canada!
Model 2: Building Sets as Historical Eras
All indications is that in SC4 the building styles were originally intended to be a time period system, with the dates being the operative aspect, not the location. So “Chicago 1890” means that it would look like Chicago in 1890, New York at the height of Art Deco in 1940, etc. The dates of the original three are spaced exactly 50 years apart, further suggesting there was logic in the dates.
Why would these particular cities be chosen as representative of the dates? This is speculative, but each city chosen has an iconic cultural and historical salience for the period depicted, an assuming the Maxis dates were chosen to be nice round numbers.
- Chicago 1890: or rather, Chicago 1893, when it held the enormously influential (on architecture, city planning, and more) World's Columbian Exposition, at the same time its rebuilding from the famous Chicago Fire resulted in the first Chicago School of architecture and its pioneering of skyscrapers, with such as Louis Sullivan and the young Frank Lloyd Wright.
- New York 1940: or rather New York 1939, when it held the iconic 1939 New York World's Fair, on the heels of being the center of Art Deco skyscraper construction of the tallest buildings in the world that decade, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.
- Houston 1990: or rather, Houston 1969; the headquarters of the US Manned Spaceflight program during the Space Race and the Cold War, the era the tileset depicts. It is also the foremost example of the numerous sprawl-heavy cities that boomed in the sweltering American south in this era due to the advent of air conditioning (along other largely-Postwar cities such as Dallas, Phoenix, and Atlanta)
By comparing what examples Maxis used, it becomes clear that time period (and associated architectural styles) are first and foremost, with only a small bit of actual regional flare, thrown in for variety. The main exception appears to have been the low-density CS being universal to all sets, perhaps a result of there not being low-density suburban sprawl as we know it in the 19th century (though with enough custom content, interesting alternatives are possible). Ignoring this as an exception made for gameplay reasons, strong stylistic patterns emerge.
Unlike geography, time periods and eras (usually) change within a single city, and thus for any given city, all tilesets may be usable. And with a fully-stocked set of four different tilesets applied to a single region, there are enormous possibilities.
A Note on Industrial Buildings
Only commercial and residential growables use tilesets; industry does not. In order to replicate the effects of a building style in reflecting historical eras, the Industrial Revolution Mod (IRM) was created. The mod simulates two eras. The Early Period (using medium-density zoning) comprises heavy industry and masonry and rust factories and warehouses, more typical of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Later Period (using heavy-density zoning) comprises the later concrete and glass, semi-trailer warehouse era, along with high-tech industry , more typical of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The IRM will be cross-referenced where appropriate.
Defining the Building Sets
After years of study and pondering the Maxis sets and the custom content universe, here is how I have broken them down so far, so as to eventually hopefully yield a full set of style tilesets.
As with the original SC4 building tilesets, the list has an Americentric bent (as does my subject-matter knowledge); however, the styles and trends featured here could be found in various places around the globe at roughly the same or similar time-frames. I have tried to leave notes on worldwide developments, especially as by the 20th century an increasingly global cross-pollination of architecture was occurring.
Beginnings
One of the great limitations of building styles is that the game is coded for there to be four, and no more. As such, if one goes by an originalist interpretation of the scope of building styles, the growable city will inevitably start out around the 1830s to 1850s.
Using growables to represent the existing city prior to this can be tricky, and so could conceivably be done through tricks of editing growability of those files mid-city, or explaining them away as due to conflagration/war/redevelopment, with token period structures being aesthetic ploppables.
The early-to-mid 19th century is, however, roughly the early limit of the game simulation itself. This starting time period can be said to represent several developments that while existing before, exploded in the first half of the 19th century in Europe and North America, and form the core of the SC4 model.
- Industrialization: the very idea of "industry" (as in the zoning type) begins to exist, with centralized "manufactories" and mills.
- Urban migration: the mass migration of persons in the USA and elsewhere from the farms to the cities to work in the various industries and consequent commercial businesses.
- Centralization: with the rapid growth of cities, the growth of the modern idea of municipal network infrastructure: orderly streets maintained by the city and services organized or governed by central municipal bureaucracies (as represented by the game), offering municipal lighting, gas, sewer, water, and linked by turnpikes and inter-city railways; to this the later 19th century would add street railways, telephones, and electricity.
Chicago 1890
Period: from roughly the mid-19th century through the end of the 1910s. Basically the whole of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the Gilded Age and the Belle Epoque; ending, as those worlds did, with the upheavals of WWI. Home entertainment meant a piano and sheet music. Sims' music of choice might be Gilbert & Sullivan or ragtime. Sim's idea of air travel would be a hot air balloon, Zeppelin, or the Wright Brother's flying machine.
The architecture here was the battleground for a stylistic debate of wide-ranging eclectic revivals and exotic tastes. The works showcased a wide variety of new technologies, from structural wrought-iron and cast-iron, mass produced materials, and dimensional lumber, to molded terra cotta, to plate glass and steel frames; each of which could now be transported by railway or steamboat.
Styles found in North America include:
- Greek Revival
- Italianate
- Gothic Revival
- Romanesque Revival and Rundbogenstil
- Second Empire (the architecture of Napoleon III, including Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris)
- Carpenter Gothic
- Queen Anne Revival (including the Stick and Shingle variants)
- Chateauesque and the various Renaissance revivals
- Beaux Arts (i.e. in the style taught at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris)
- the first Chicago School and Commercial Style
- Art Nouveau and Jugendstil
- the swath of low-style folk buildings that make up the backbone of rural areas, from farmhouses to country stores.
- the landscape architecture of Frederick Law Olmstead and his disciples
Styles not found in North America include:
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a swath of nationalistic Romantic revivals, such as
- Scottish Baronial
- Neo-Russian
- Neo-Manueline (Portugal)
- the architecture of the late Qing Dynasty in China
- the Meiji Period of Japan, including Japanese-Western Eclectic Architecture
Notable Forms: Early skyscrapers exist under the influence of the first Chicago School (e.g. Louis Sullivan and Burnham & Root) and Cass Gilbert (the Woolworth Building)--with one of the last examples of this stylistic era being Chicago's Wrigley Building (begun 1920).
Industry: consists of what one would find in the IR mod Low-density: i.e. brick and rusting iron.
In Sum: "Hill Valley 1885"
New York 1940
Period: roughly the 1910s to ca. 1950-1955: a relatively short but architecturally-rich period, it saw the birth of modern architecture and its clashes with classicism, dominated by the mediating movement that was Art Deco. Home entertainment meant the family radio. Sims' music of choice would likely be jazz, in its many incarnations. Sim's idea of air travel would be on a trimotor, DC-3, or China Clipper flying boat.
This era was quickly brought to a lingering end by WWII and the post-war rebuilding, which yielded new technologies, tastes, and ideas.
Styles found in North America and beyond include:
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Modern-leaning styles include:
- Art Deco
- Art Moderne
- early examples of the Bauhaus-inspired International Style
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Traditionalist and eclectic styles include:
- Neoclassicism
- Stripped Classicism (a simplified and Art Deco-inspired version of Neoclassicism favored in the austerity of the New Deal)
- Italian Renaissance
- Colonial Revival
- Spanish Revival
- Mayan Revival
- Tudor Revival
- late Gothic Revival.
Outside North America, this period would also include:
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early modernism styles such as
- Bauhaus
- De Stijl
- Expressionism
- Constructivism
- the reactionary Socialist Classicism (Stalinist) and various Fascist styles
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the regional Art Deco-inspired styles, such as
- the Imperial Crown Style (teikan yōshiki) of Shōwa Japan
- the architecture of Lutyen's Delhi in India.
This era also includes the Arts & Crafts-styled suburbs of catalog houses and American foursquares. While chronologically, they start around 1900, they were a reaction against the Victorian styles and lasted through the start of WWII. This is also where Maxis put them. So the switch to a new tileset for residential would begin a decade or so (1900s-1910s) before the commercial styles caught up (1920s).
Notable forms: in general, most single-screen movie theaters would be here. Bowling alleys, roller skating rinks, etc. were also common in this period. CS low would be full of classic neon-and-chrome laden roadside architecture, such as motor lodges, diners, and drive-in theatres and restaurants (but not yet drive-thrus!), to fill out the early Post-War American highway landscapes prior to freeways. The Maxis set also suggests that the early public housing projects such as Pruitt-Igoe belong here.
Distinctive residential forms include the smaller suburban "garden apartments" as commonly found in less densely urbanized cities. However, as of 2019, these as well as of townhouses of the period, are all but missing from the custom content universe.
Industry: consists of the IRM Early Period (i.e. brick and rust), with some more modern (perhaps as WWII-era defense stuff such as aircraft and electronics plants as “I-HT”)
In Sum: like "Hill Valley 1955"
Houston 1990
Period: Roughly 1950 to the 1990s; from when the International Style of modernism took hold under the Bauhaus diaspora, through the height of the Post-Modern reaction in the 1990s. Home entertainment meant the TV. Many sims' music of choice would be rock & roll, soul, disco, or anything on a Moog synthesizer. Sim's idea of air travel would be by a DC-8 or 747.
Styles include:
- Mid-Century Modern
- the International Style / Miesian & the Second Chicago School
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Reaction movements against the above:
- New Formalism
- Brutalism
- Structuralism
- Neo-expressionism
- Critical regionalism
- Metabolism and other regional movements in Late Shōwa Japan
- Hi-Tech
- Shed style and various environmentally-conscious styles of the 1970s.
- Post-Modernism and De-Architecture
- corporate branding identity architecture of chain stores and restaurants
- the landscape architecture of Lawrence Halprin, Dan Kiley, etc.
Notable forms: Commercial forms are numerous, ranging from strip malls to full indoor shopping malls, along with drive-thru restaurants, multiplex theatres, large auto-dealerships, and early big-box stores.
Residential forms include both concrete apartment towers and automobile suburbia. While nearly universal in real-life, at present content featuring low-density American suburbia is extremely weak for the ca. 1950 to 1985 period (especially compared to CS). For instance, as of 2019, I don't think there is a single BAT of a split-level, a form which according to one survey represented some 25% of the housing stock of one large suburban county.
Industry: consists of the IR newer designs (concrete and metal).
In Sum: "Hill Valley 1985"
Euro-Contemporary
There are two ways of looking at this set, which was not part of the original game but was added in the "Rush Hour" expansion.
As Euro:
First, best I can tell, this Maxis set represents the direction of European architecture since the rebuilding of Europe following WWII, as influenced by the Scandinavian schools of design, Le Corbusier, and CIAM, with some regional touches. For that set, Sims' music of choice would be Eurovision. It serves as a regional alternative to the Houston 1990.
As Contemporary:
Second, I see this as fitting architectural development in the USA since SC4 was published; many of the buildings in that tileset uncannily presage the new movements at that time. And so for those building American cities, the contemporary tileset would logically take place for developments since roughly 2000, where home entertainment means the Internet. Moreso, these reflect the new tastes and styles prominent after the global recession of 2008.
Some styles and trends prominent since 2000, as they have variously been known or called,
- "Starchitecture" of major statement landmarks
- Deconstructivism
- Blobitecture and other CAD-driven styles
- Decoupage
- McMansions / Millenium Mansions
- the second wave of environmentally-conscious "green" architecture
- the increasingly generic retail/restaurant architecture
- various other styles that have yet to be fully studied and canonically named by architectural critics and historians
Industry here would be mostly the modern, both I-M, but especially I-HT (with server farms, startup hubs, incubators, etc.)
Note: I am not alone in disliking of many of the architectural developments since the 2000s (e.g. McMansions, Deconstructivism, etc.). So as there isn't yet enough to make a complete tileset anyways (or at least it would be much smaller than the Houston 1990 one), I extended and filled it out with the more recent postmodern stuff from the 1990 set (e.g. the more recent versions of chain stores), to create a perpetual world that resembles my architectural dreams as a youth.
In Sum: "Hill Valley, 2015"
Alternative Ideas
I have toyed with the idea to rework the 1990 and Euro sets to instead be something like a “Los Angeles 1975” (high modern) and a “Northern Virginia 2000” (Post-Modern). As there isn't enough content yet to give each a dedicated set, one can use a core set for each (of generic-period modern), and then assign more distinctly-period styled works to their relevant times. I am still experimenting with this, but it looks promising.
Conclusion
Hopefully, the ideas above may help inform those in the game community to think about the role and possibilities of building styles in creating richer and more historically- and architecturally-informed cities, and help modders to see how they can better use the building style tags as well as to think about what may be missing to round out more robust style sets.
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