The Arizona Historical Society building of Tucson, designed by Josias Joesler in 1954, is the state of Arizona’s oldest historical agency. The building has been updated
several times over the years, but the landscape along the main entrance has been neglected. The client would like to see a more welcoming entrance that can be used
for events and enhances the museum’s image. This design aims to attract visitors to the museum by utilizing both native and exotic vegetation to create distinct “desert”
and “lush” zones. Both zones are “In the Spirit of Arizona” and showcase the rich local history and culture of the area.
Oblique image of the existing Arizona History Museum,
Pictures of the site before the redesign.
The project was first drafted in AutoDesk AutoCAD so that measurements were very precise for things such as park area, curb distances, and building placement. Early blueprints of the History Museum Building was consulted in addition to hours of measuring each angle with tape measures on site.
Once the AutoCAD file was completed it was brought into SketchUp for 3D modeling. After a many hours of modeling was completed, the SketchUp file was processed in SUPodium, which is a program that adds photo-realism to the otherwise sketch features in SketchUp. The difference between a finished SketchUp model and a model after it has gone through post processing in SUPodium can be viewed below.
