Medieval City Project - WIP

[Tom_Brick]

Over the last months, I've been working on a side project, namely to build a fully modular medieval city. I had several main goals:

• The city should be fully modular, a.k.a. you should be able to arrange the houses whichever way you like, meaning they had to have a standardised size and layout so that they'd all fit together. Also, it opens up the possibility of using the same basic house multiple times in multiple situations.
• The look should be cleaner than the typical medieval MOCs we get these days. While I love the "rotten medieval" look, for a city I figured that people back then also took care of their property and wanted it to look nice.
• The city should give you that narrow feeling of little roads between houses that are built wall to wall as is the case in old towns.

I've come quite a long way, unfortunately I had to find out that my original goals came with significant drawbacks. The biggest one being that making the houses modular means that I cant have overhangs or decorations on the outside walls as any house could be next to any other house and I can't have windows on most walls for the same reason. Also, it means that it's very difficult to have anything but a strict grid structure even though I tried my best to also have diagonals. And of course it means I can't have elevation changes. 

That's why I'm currently rethinking the entire approach. I don't really want to abandon the project outright (too much work has been put into it already), but I also don't want to continue the way I started. So it's on hold for now until I figure out what I want to do with it. Abandoning the idea of full modularity seems like the logical choice, though I really don't like admitting defeat on that front. Another option would be to have modular quarters, but that would probably blow up the size beyond any reasonable measure. Or I could just live with the drawbacks. As I said, I don't know yet what I want to do.

Anyway, here are some pictures of where I'm at as of now:

              

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 22, 2021 by Tom_Brick
added an image

[Jack Sassy]

Brilliant idea! I meself begun building a small city, which was meant to be around 17th - 19th century style. I'd like to see how this turns out in the end.

[victorycount]

Wow, I love it! Perfectly clean but still interesting enough.

Just the style I'm trying to implement in my ongoing "castle & city of Thun" project. I will have to copy some of your ideas(minus the modular thing), although it won't get any close to this.

And how you got that fully modular, makes it even more incredible. But if It wont work out, maybe you can make it partial modular, on the other hand I think it works out really well so far. Great work

[Sarophas]

Very interesting! I do miss some more details/overhangs on the buildings (I only say this because you clearly have the skills/ideas and point this out yourself) but I do understand the problems that causes in regards to your plans. Overall though I see so much potential! Also really great work on all of the diagonal elements

Can't wait to see more updates!

[caiman0637]

Nice! How do you find time to do this?

[Tom_Brick]

5 hours ago, Jack Sassy said:

Brilliant idea! I meself begun building a small city, which was meant to be around 17th - 19th century style. I'd like to see how this turns out in the end.

Most of those 17th-19th century cities do have a medieval core. sprinkled with some Renaissance architecture.

4 hours ago, victorycount said:

Wow, I love it! Perfectly clean but still interesting enough.

Just the style I'm trying to implement in my ongoing "castle & city of Thun" project. I will have to copy some of your ideas(minus the modular thing), although it won't get any close to this.

And how you got that fully modular, makes it even more incredible. But if It wont work out, maybe you can make it partial modular, on the other hand I think it works out really well so far. Great work

Thank you, I really appreciate it. My current thinking is indeed to have a small collection of houses per module (maybe 2-4). But I don't know. I'm putting it on hold for now and try something different which I may be able to incorporate into it in the end and which could give me a new direction.

3 hours ago, Sarophas said:

Very interesting! I do miss some more details/overhangs on the buildings (I only say this because you clearly have the skills/ideas and point this out yourself) but I do understand the problems that causes in regards to your plans. Overall though I see so much potential! Also really great work on all of the diagonal elements

Can't wait to see more updates!

That's one of my problems. Since I want the houses to be right upon one another, in most cases three of the four side walls must be perfectly flat as they could be placed next to any other building. If you look at the sand-green house for example, the roof goes over the side walls which means that I cant really place it next to any of my other houses. So something needs to be done.

34 minutes ago, caiman0637 said:

Nice! How do you find time to do this?

I don't really, which is why it took me months to get to this point 

[jtooker]

Great ideas and execution.  I really like the cobblestone ground - it makes having different sized and shaped buildings work well.

11 hours ago, Tom_Brick said:

modular means that I cant have overhangs or decorations on the outside walls as any house could be next to any other house and I can't have windows on most walls for the same reason

You could certainly have cobblestone around the sides, but then you'd have alleys.  If you knew two buildings would be next to each other, then it doesn't matter that they even have nice looking walls (except for whichever is taller).

 

11 hours ago, Tom_Brick said:

And of course it means I can't have elevation changes. 

I'd recommend checking out the MILS standard.  The standard base is 1 baseplate, 1 brick and 1 plate high.  All module borders must meet here.  The standard does specify hills and such, but they are quite steep and then you still need to coordinate with others to make sure your hills align.  But that thickness does give some nice variety of elevation within a module (or several under the coordination of one person) - especially if you need to go 'down' - which you cannot do if everything is on a single baseplate.

I've given some though to medieval module standards and have not heard of any idea that addresses the elevation challenge AND have independent modules.  The best looking collaborations agree on the grading where two modules meet (and only those two modules can meet there).  This requires careful coordination/dedication by participants, but looks great.

[Tom_Brick]

50 minutes ago, jtooker said:

You could certainly have cobblestone around the sides, but then you'd have alleys.  If you knew two buildings would be next to each other, then it doesn't matter that they even have nice looking walls (except for whichever is taller).

Having little alleys around buildings is not an option as I want the look of an old medieval town where most of the houses are right on top of each other. But as I said above, I'm thinking of doing it in small clusters, so that I always have 2-4 houses together. It means less modularity but more room for details and might be a good compromise.

I'd recommend checking out the

MILS standard.

Thanks, I didn't know there was a standard. I've seen that technique before and actually thought about doing it that way at first but then I figured that it would unnecessarily increase the part-count...and expensive parts at that. But now I wish I had done it like that cause realistically, the price for those plates won't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, given how massive it already is.

Now that you mention it, I'll probably switch to that system. I might not follow the standard to 100%, I'll have to see how it looks in detail.

[Ludzik]

Great builds!   I would place the though in an era slightly later then medieval ;)

 

On 3/22/2021 at 3:01 PM, Tom_Brick said:

Having little alleys around buildings is not an option as I want the look of an old medieval town where most of the houses are right on top of each other. But as I said above, I'm thinking of doing it in small clusters, so that I always have 2-4 houses together. It means less modularity but more room for details and might be a good compromise.

 

 

Thanks, I didn't know there was a standard. I've seen that technique before and actually thought about doing it that way at first but then I figured that it would unnecessarily increase the part-count...and expensive parts at that. But now I wish I had done it like that cause realistically, the price for those plates won't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, given how massive it already is.

Now that you mention it, I'll probably switch to that system. I might not follow the standard to 100%, I'll have to see how it looks in detail.

So I had the same issue with my castle build - I didn't use mils to start with and just recently I spent a few nights putting my castle on mils bases - the castle is modular and uses 6 base plates total so it was a bit of work.

[Tom_Brick]

10 hours ago, Ludzik said:

Great builds!   I would place the though in an era slightly later then medieval ;)

I was going for the late medieval period...15th century or so. I'm no expert on the history of architecture, but by and large I feel that's pretty accurate. Although since I mostly just build based on my intuition and rarely with actual buildings I want to copy, I might be off here and there. I feel like the all tan building might be off by a couple of centuries, but I want to work on that one anyway as I don't really like it...and I guess the roof shingles on my inn (the one with the diagonal shape) are anachronistic, but I really like the look, so I didn't care.

So I had the same issue with my castle build - I didn't use mils to start with and just recently I spent a few nights putting my castle on mils bases - the castle is modular and uses 6 base plates total so it was a bit of work.

So far, this is all only digital, so it should be a fairly quick job in my case. It's already modular with standardised sizes, so all I have to do is to create two or three standard MILS bases and swap them in. Though since I probably want to reduce some modularity, that point may very well take a lot of time. 

But as I said earlier, I'm currently playing around a bit with something else (that has gotten "slightly" out of control) and that may well be the basis for my future direction.

[Ludzik]

If it's digital you got it easy ;). Moving an actual building up is a PITA!

And yes, I'll go with late 15th and 16th century ;)