For this assignment I chose Watanabe house. Watanabe House at Carleton College in Northfield Minnesota is one of the college’s newer campus residential buildings. It’s part of a group of recently constructed interest houses living-learning communities designed around shared themes and specifically houses the Atlas interest house, which focuses on global cultures and cross-cultural engagement. The house is named for Tsune Watanabe, a member of the Class of 1891 and the first international student to graduate from Carleton. Residents there live together and participate in activities centered on cultural sharing and global awareness. Watanabe house opened up in the fall of 2025.
How does attempting to model a building compare to simply viewing one through photographs or maps?
Attempting to model a building is able to engage a user in a way which is fundamentally different than just looking at photos and maps. Photos take a building and flatten it into one angle chosen by the photographer and maps are shown to its user in symbols. In contrast modeling makes the modeler understand the building not as a 2D image but as a full three dimensional structure. The modeler learns about a variety of aspects that a photo or map can’t teach them such as proportions, scale, and depth. This leads to the user having better spatial understanding of the building.
Does the process of photogrammetry encourage close looking and attention to details you might otherwise have ignored?
The process of photogrammetry strongly encourages close, careful looking in ways that casual observation does not. To produce a usable model, you have to pay attention to textures, material changes, lighting conditions, and small architectural details such as window frames, seams, or surface irregularities. When the software struggles—producing distortions or gaps—you are pushed to revisit the images and notice what might have caused the issue. This feedback loop trains you to see buildings not as uniform objects, but as complex surfaces shaped by design choices, weathering, and use over time.
My process was pretty difficult, I used Polycam to scan the house while it simultaneously captured photos. The scan didn’t come out great, for a whole half of the house nothing was generated in the model and the parts that were generated were distorted because I was in close proximity with other houses and couldn’t get a great scan. When I was going to put the photos from the scan into the google drive folder it said I had to pay to get them so I had to go back to the house and take more photos. At least in the end I learned how interacting/creating models helps one learn more from it as you work with how the building works in a 3D space.