MAC Entry: Repairing the Walls of Petraea

[Gideon]

Master Architect Challenge: Repairing the Walls of Petraea

The walls of Petraea is one of the mightiest structures in Kaliphlin, tall and strong they have protected the city for centuries. Several miles long, they encircle the entire city of Petraea. During the onslaught by the elementals, for example as described here, parts of the walls got damaged and hard work is ongoing to repair them.

The wall is faced with cut blocks of the ubiquitous Kaliphlin limestone and has a core of mortar mixed with various solid objects such as bricks, stones, roof tiles and parts of even older structures. In long parts of the walls a clever building technique has been used,where several bands of brick are laid through the whole thickness of the wall. In addition to its decorative value, the brick bands also bond the stone face to the mortar core increasing the strength of the wall. At irregular intervals, depending on the terrain, towers provide defenders with positions to fire upon attacking enemies. A typical tower can be seen here, with a battlemented roof and several floors with windows or arrow slits, depending on the height above the ground.

The lower floors of the tower are accessed by a door at the back of the tower, while the top floor and roof platform are accessed from the walkway on top of the wall.

Sir Gideon is assisting in this effort by hiring the Arkbri Falcons to repair one stretch of the wall where the tower and top of the wall got damaged. The Falcons are of course doing very little manual labor themselves, but are instead using a group of orcish prisoners of war captured when

The soldiers of the Arkbri Falcons seize all the opportunity they can to bully their captured orcs, and everyone turns a blind eye to this practice as former servants of Victor Revolword are thoroughly disliked in Petraea.

Ediz Falconi and his men certainly don’t work for free, not even when aiding old friends as Sir Gideon.

As with the Arkbri Falcons, the Petraean guards also prefer to idly watch the orcs do the work rather than lending a helping hand themselves. A captain of the Petraean city guard is however patrolling the walls to inspect the progress of the repairs, and he might not be entirely satisfied with his lazy soldiers...

Don’t look down!

Built in only three days as my time away from my bricks got extended due to extraordinary good weather. This was by far the most forced build and also the most tan-consuming build I’ve made. I’m not entirely satisfied with the photos, so I will maybe re-shoot later but this first attempt is what I had to work with to meet the MAC deadline. Also pardon (and please point out!) any typos and grammar errors as I write this at a time which is way into the night Swedish time...

[Hyler Talliwell]

Beautiful build. The wall cross-section is great, and the tower details came out very well. I also approve of the use of slaves, being from Nocturnus.

[Captain Settle]

Fantastic MOC! I love how the brick bricks break up the tan.

[SkaForHire]

I guess this proves that our capital is the mightiest. I hadn't expected to see a building taller than the triumphal arch!!! Excellent build, even if you felt it was rushed, I think you really captured the glory of the Petraea. The cross-section is pretty awesome. Again, your photography is a notch above most other people, even if you were not satisfied. I think you photo tan better than anyone else.

[Mike S]

This is awesome! You really did an excellent job portraying Petraea's wall and I think you are pretty much guaranteed to win Kaliphlin's prize if not the best all around....

[Esurient]

Wow! Awesome MOC! Very detailed! I like how you designed the tower!

[Alfadas]

I love this build, lots of details and the walls are really high! I would not like to be the one fig with vertigo. I feel sorry for the orcs, they can live in peace, far away on a deserted island. Why keep 'm as slaves?

But all in all, a great build! How long have you been building this?

[Yooha]

Very well done. The "filling" between the walls look good! But those poor orcs! Do they have a union?

[soccerkid6]

Honestly I couldn't tell that this was a "rushed" build. The sheer size and detail of the wall and tower are magnificent I especially like the little details: the brick stripes, the holes in the wall, the crane, the bricks and crates behind the wall, the buttresses The slight angle in the wall is great too

[robuko]

Woot! Awesome build, Gideon. Really nicely done and beautifully presented as always. Love the filling, funny how regular the cross section is.

[Kai NRG]

Excellent job! The size is mind-blowing and the wall texture is great! I like the way you had the orcs do the work as well! Great work!

On another note... I knew when you said you'd enter I was doomed...

[kabel]

Magnificent wall design, everything looking extremely good, and what I like most is the slight tilt you have in your wall!

[fhomess]

Easily my favorite MAC build to this point. Nice work.

I particularly like how the wall is large enough that it's easy to see how it withstood the elemental attack.

Edited August 2, 2013 by fhomess

[NiL_FisK_Urd]

Wow. This is a really massive build. I like how you damaged the wall.

[mrcp6d]

Winner, winner, chicken dinner; this is beautiful Gideon! The little tree on the backside is a great little addition of color, and your attention to detail throughout is magnificent. Well played.

the brick bands also bond the stone face to the mortar core increasing the strength of the wall.

Is this a real-life thing? Do we have any civil/architectural engineers and/or medieval castle experts around?

[Gideon]

Thank you all for your comments and kind words!

I guess this proves that our capital is the mightiest. I hadn't expected to see a building taller than the triumphal arch!!! Excellent build, even if you felt it was rushed, I think you really captured the glory of the Petraea. The cross-section is pretty awesome. Again, your photography is a notch above most other people, even if you were not satisfied. I think you photo tan better than anyone else.

Of course our capital is the mightiest I wanted to try to build something which looked big in minifig scale, and I had this idea in the back of my head for several weeks when away from my bricks in July. I had no idea of if my tan bricks would be enough (and no time to bricklink more). I ended stretched my supply of tan bricks to the extreme, just some table scraps left even after the painful decision to scrap all my previous Kaliphlin MOCs. I could probably barely fill out the damaged parts and would then probably have to use 2xN plates

I found a nice tool in Picasa to adjust the color balance to a known white/grey area (like my backdrop sheet), which helps in getting tan to show a bit better. I've also switched to only use flash bounced on a white roof instead of trying to use other sources of light. So a bit of experience helps, compare to my old photo I'm showing below (shot with incandescent bulb lighting, no backdrop and not a very good white balance...).

This just proves again that GoH is an excellent way to improve!

Wow! Awesome MOC! Very detailed! I like how you designed the tower!

I was a bit constrained in my design, since I had already hinted at the design of the tower and walls in my introduction post and wanted to try to replicate that:

The new tower has roughly the same shape and size, but as with the wall it got the brick bands added and also got an external stair instead of the ladder I used in the old build.

The merlons in the new build didn't get the arrow slits though, mostly because I didn't have enough 1x1 with stud on one side in tan (if you look closely you can see that I used light bley ones in the old build) and wanted to dedicate the few I had to arrow slits in the tower and some SNOT damage details.

I originally built the wall to the same width as in the old build, but it looked a bit too thin 8-wide so 1 day before deadline I split it and rebuilt it 10-wide, not least to increase the width of the filling. Do I need to say that it took more time than I had expected to do it?

Is this a real-life thing? Do we have any civil/architectural engineers and/or medieval castle experts around?

Yes it is historically accurate as far as I know, the inspiration for adding brick bands (and to be honest inspiration in general) came from the walls of Constantinople. This particular technique of using periodic layers of brick (40 cm thick) throughout the wall was used there to strengthen the wall's resilience against earthquakes.

[mrcp6d]

Yes it is historically accurate as far as I know, the inspiration for adding brick bands (and to be honest inspiration in general) came from the walls of Constantinople. This particular technique of using periodic layers of brick (40 cm thick) throughout the wall was used there to strengthen the wall's resilience against earthquakes.

<snip>

Cool, I did manage to learn something new today, thanks!

[Wedge09]

Impressive work :thumbup: The men at the bottom seem so small from the top

[Legonardo]

Brown Grass!!!

oh nice build too

love it man, keep it up, this is phenomenally awesome

and huge

[HammerBro]

Great job, I especially like the mortar with brick bits. Well done on keeping the walls interesting with the enormous space they take up, I know it can be hard to pull off.

My Flickr

[Ecclesiastes]

Excellent, really excellent! So well detailed, even better with the wall slightly angled. Also nice to see were you got your inspiration from

[Maxim I]

I haven't based the walls of Mpya Stedor on those of Constantinople, but I did the same thing by having brick bands in my wall

Anyway, thank you very much Gideon for blinding my eyes with this fabulous entry!!! Seriously this is one of the most beautifull things I have ever seen!!!

Oh, and also a thank you for sending my famous walls back to kindergarten seriously, lucky Petraea is our capital and a Kaliphlin city, otherwise I would have ordered my engineers to make my wall higher

[Thomas of Tortuga]

This is why I joined Kaliphin!

[Gideon]

For the University of Petraea's Doctorate of Historica Program I claim the following advance credits for this build:

• Advanced windows and window frames [architecture] (for the SNOT arrowslits with brick "arch" above)
  
• SNOTed tile stonework [architecture] (for SNOT tiles used as texture in the walls)
  
• Minifig posing [general building]
  

Total: 3 credits 2 credits

Write +1 if you approve or a motivation if you think this build did not deserve one or more of the credits

Edit: Removed one credit because of too many advance credits claimed

Edited November 8, 2013 by Gideon

[gedren_y]

UoP DoH +1