I started with some sketchy, almost gestural drawings. I only scanned two, but imagine a stack of twenty. My method is just to tear through them—dash one off, pull out a new sheet of paper, do another. It’s to loosen up as much as anything else. And by moving quickly, you keep the evaluating/filtering part of your brain at bay.

And, often, you surprise yourself.

This one’s a bit different, but it gets at the mood I was imagining:

These got me going in the right direction, but honestly they were all a bit too Barad-dûr for my taste. I knew I wanted the tower to have a more restrained, geometric form—but not without sacrificing some of the weirdness I’d sketched out.

So it seemed like the next step was a 3D model. I knew I wanted to make a model if I could, because it gives you so much flexibility; you can “pose” it however you like, and if you’re not happy with the way it looks, you can just try a different angle.

I’m actually terrible at traditional 3D modeling—I never got past the sphere-and-cube phase—but I’m pretty good with Processing…

…so I wrote a computer program to make a model for me. After lots of tweaking, here’s what I ended up with. (Press play.)

Now, I was building a new tower, but I wanted some recognizable Sutro-ness, too, so I did a little cut-and-paste engineering:

Not the most elegant method, but: a) I knew the silhouette was the important thing, not the architectural specifics; b) I couldn’t afford to spend all day on it; and c) it turns out I like the blunt chimeric look!

Get ready to scroll! Here’s the hybrid tower, fully assembled:

I think you can see some of the vibe of those original sketches reflected here—there’s a lot of twistiness.

Here’s the SketchUp file if you want to play around with it.

So then it was just a matter of finding a cool angle, snapping a picture, and building a scene around it in Photoshop. Here’s the finished product (created at 300dpi for printing, but scaled down for display here):

And here it is at night:

So now I need your help: Which do you prefer?

P.S. Here’s the project this is part of; check it out if you haven’t yet!