Refining the Concept

      I had a chance to speak with Kevin and gather his thoughts about my sketches for the Afghan Village project. He was able to provide me with a clearer idea of what he wanted. He is less concerned about the bases being fully geomorphic and that opened up the possibilities for the terrain by quite a bit. I no longer had to be concerned about bringing all of the elevations down to grade as they approached the edge of the base. This led to some deep thinking (which of course led to a nap) and then some Google-Fu  looking at images of Afghanistani villages. To a Midwesterner it is an odd looking place; so much dust, dryness and rocks to contrast with the shocking green of the irrigated and cultivated areas. To make my thinking more concrete I went back to this drawing;

            Then I tapped into my home-remodelling days and made little cut-outs of the building footprints. These are very helpful as you can position them on the terrain that you are drawing to ensure that the hill will hold the building. A few minutes of sketching produced three different hill arrangements that would hold all of the village buildings, provide a significant amount of elevation and still have road-access on three side. Then I drew up a sketch of the riverbank that also had road access on three sides. This would mean that there are nine different terrain combinations before we start swapping out buildings and crop features.

      I have to admit that I cheated a little by placing the buildings in what looked like a reasonable arrangement and then drawing in terrain lines. But it provides a method for understanding the space that each building needs and the sort of gradients involved. Here are some of the maps with buildings on the them. Each terrain line indicated the depth of one panel of blue-board which is about 33mm in thickness, the hatchuring points downhill.

 

      Then you have the geomorphic  part of the equation. the panels are designed to allow for the hill section to be positioned on any of the three sides of the river section, and with a choice of one of its three sides facing the river section. Like this:

     I won't go through all of the possible permutations as you have, no doubt, gotten the idea by now. All that remains is for Kevin to pick his floor-plan and I can start cutting studs and slinging mud.